Kronslacb PAUL AVRICH 1921 - Libcom

Kronslacb1921

PAUL AVRICH THE UPRISING OF SAILORS

AT THE KRONSTADT NAVAL

BASE IS EXAMINEDINTI-iE CONT EXT OFTHEPOLlTfCAL

DEVELOPMENT OF THE NEW SOVIET ST ATE

�BONST.fIDT

1921

PAUL AVRICH

The Norton Library

W·W·NORTON & COMPANY·INC·

NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT © 1970 BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

First published in the Norton Library 1974 by arrangement with Princeton University Press

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published simultaneously in Canada by George ]. McLeod Limited, Toronto

Books That Live The Norton imprint on a book means that in the publisher's estimation it is a book not for a single season but for the years. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A vrich, Paul.

Kronstadt, 1921. (The Norton library) Reprint of the ed. published by the Princeton

University Press, Princeton, N.]., in series: Studies of the Russian Institute, Columbia University.

1. Kronstadt, Russia-History-Revolt, 1921. I. Title. II. Series: Columbia University. Russian Institute. Studies. [DK265.8.K7 A88 1974] 947'.45'0841 ISBN 0-393-00724-3

Printed in the United States of America 1 2 3 45 6 7 8 9 0

73-22130

For Ina, Jane, and Karen

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Contents

1 . The Crisis of War Communism

2. Petrograd and Kronstadt

3 . Kronstadt and the Russian Emigration

4. First Assault

5. The Kronst!idt Program

6. Suppression

7. Epilogue

APPENDIXES

A. Memorandum on the Question of Organizing

xi

3

7

35

88

1 3 1

1 57

1 93

2 1 8

an Uprising in Kronstadt 235

B. What We Are Fighting For 241

C. Socialism in Quotation Marks 244

Annotated Bibliography 247

Index 26 1

Illustrations

(following page 100)

(All of the illustrations are from the collection of the

Helsinki University Library with one exception as noted)

The City of Kronstadt

The Battleship Sevastopol

Seaman S. M. Petrichenko

Major General A. N. Kozlovsky

Lieutenant Colonel E. N. Solovianov

A Kronstadt Refugee in Finland

Kronstadt Refugees Arriving at Terijoki

Kronstadt Refugees at Work in Finland

Lenin with Party Delegates Fresh from Kronstadt Victory

(Novosti Press Agency: Soviet Life)

Acknowledgments

I am pleased to express my gratitude to the many colleagues and friends who assisted me in the preparation of this volume. lowe a special debt of thanks to three outstanding teachers and scholars, Professors Geroid T. Robinson, Henry L. Roberts, and Michael T. Florinsky, who guided my study of Russian history at Columbia University. I am also indebted to Max Nomad and Professor Loren Graham, who read the entire manuscript and made valuable comments and criticisms. Marina Tinkoff, Xenia J. Eudin, Anna M. Bourguina, N. Zhigulev, Peter Sedgwick, Edward Weber, Alexis Struve, and Eino Nivanka were good enough to answer my inquiries and to make a number of helpful suggestions. I am grateful to Professor Philip E. Mosely for granting me access to the Archive of Russian and East European History and Culture at Columbia University, and to its curator, L. F. Magerovsky, for his assistance in finding pertinent documents. My thanks are due also to the staffs of the Columbia, Harvard, and Hoover Libraries, the New York Public Library, the Helsinki University Library, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives for their courteous help in my search for materials . Although I have drawn on numerous sources, I am especially indebted to the pioneering studies of Ida Mett and George Katkov which are listed in the bibliography. Needless to say, however, responsibility for this volume is entirely my own.

I am deeply grateful to the Russian Institute of Columbia University, with which I have been associated as a Senior Fellow, and particularly to its Director, Professor Marshall Shulman, for his warm hospitality and encouragement. I am also indebted to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Social Science Research Council for supporting my research on Russian anarchism and mass revolts, of which the present study is a byproduct.

K RONS T AD T 1921

NOTE: In transliterating Russian words and proper names, I have followed the Library of Congress system in the footnotes and bibliography, but have modified this slightly in the text for the sake of readability.

It should also be noted that the terms "Bolshevik" and "Communist" are used interchangeably throughout the book (the Bolsheviks officially changed their name to Communists in March 1 91 8).

Introduction

"This was the flash," said Lenin of the Kronstadt rebellion, "which lit up reality better than anything else."l In March 192 1 the sailors of the naval fortress in the Gulf of Finland, the "pride and glory" of the Russian Revolution, rose in revolt against the Bolshevik government, which they themselves had helped into power. Under the slogan of "free soviets," they established a revolutionary commune that survived for 16 days, until an army was sent across the ice to crush it. After a long and savage struggle, with heavy losses on both sides, the rebels were subdued.

The rising at once provoked a bitter controversy that has never quite abated. Why had the sailors revolted? According to the Bolsheviks, they were agents of a White Guard conspiracy hatched in the West by Russian emigres and their Allied supporters. To their sympathizers, however, they were revolutionary martyrs fighting to restore the soviet idea against the Bolshevik dictatorship. The suppression of the revolt was, in their eyes, an act of brutality which shattered the myth that Soviet Russia was a "workers' and peasants' state." In the aftermath, a number of foreign Communists questioned their faith in a government which could deal so ruthlessly with genuine mass protest. In this respect Kronstadt was the prototype of later events which would lead disillusioned radicals to break with the movement and to search for the original purity of their ideals. The liquidation of the kulaks, the Great Purge, the Nazi-Soviet pact, Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin--each produced an exodus of party members and supporters who were convinced that the revolution had been betrayed. "What counts decisively," wrote Louis Fischer in 1949, "is the 'Kronstadt.' Until its advent, one may waver emotionally or doubt intellectually or even

1 V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th edn. , 55 voIs., Mos

cow, 1 958-1965, XLIII, 1 3 8.

3

INTRODUCTION

reject the cause altogether in one's mind and yet refuse to attack it. I had no 'Kronstadt' for many years."2

Others found their "Kronstadt" later still-in the Hungarian uprising of 1956. For in Budapest, as in Kronstadt, the rebels sought to transform an authoritarian and bureaucratic regime into a genuine socialist democracy. To the Bolsheviks, however, such heresy was a greater menace than outright opposition to the principles of socialism. Hungary-and again Czechoslovakia in 1968-was dangerous not because it was counterrevolutionary, but because, like Kronstadt, its conception of the revolution and of socialism diverged sharply from that of the Soviet leadership; yet Moscow, as in 1921, denounced the rising as a counterrevolutionary plot and proceeded to suppress it. The crushing of Budapest, noted one critic of Soviet policy, showed again that the Communists would stop at nothing to destroy those who challenged their authority. 3

Yet such comparisons must not be pressed too far. For events separated by 35 years and occurring in different countries with entirely different participants cannot possess more than a superficial resemblance. Soviet Russia in 192 1 was not the Leviathan of recent decades. It was a young and insecure state, faced with a rebellious population at home and implacable enemies abroad who longed to see the Bolsheviks ousted from power. More important still, Kronstadt was in Russian territory; what confronted the Bolsheviks was a mutiny in their own navy at its most strategic outpost, guarding the western approaches to Petrograd. Kronstadt, they feared, might ignite the Russian mainland or become the springboard for another anti-Soviet invasion. There was

2 Richard Crossman, ed., The God That Failed, New York, 1 950,

p. 207.

3 Emanuel Pollack, The Kronstadt Rebellion, New York, 1 959, Introduction. Cf. Angelica Balabanoff, Impressions of Lenin, Ann

Arbor, 1964, pp. 58-59.

4

INTRODUCTION

mounting evidence that Russian emigres were trying to assist the insurrection and to turn it to their own advantage. Not that the activities of the Whites can excuse any atrocities which the Bolsheviks committed against the sailors. But they do make the government's sense of urgency to crush the revolt more understandable. In a few weeks the ice in the Finnish Gulf would melt, and supplies and reinforcements could then be shipped in from the West, converting the fortress into a base for a new intervention. Apart from the propaganda involved, Lenin and Trotsky appear to have been genuinely anxious over this possibility.

Few Western historians, unfortunately, have taken proper account of these anxieties. And Soviet writers, for their part, have done considerable violence to the facts by treating the rebels as dupes or agents of a White conspiracy. The present volume tries to examine the rebellion in a truer perspective. To accomplish this, Kronstadt must be set within a broader context of political and social events, for the revolt was part of a larger crisis marking the transition from War Communism to the New Economic Policy, a crisis which Lenin regarded as the gravest he had faced since coming to power. It is necessary, moreover, to relate the rising to the long tradition of spontaneous rebellion in Kronstadt itself and in Russia as a whole. Such an approach, one hopes, will shed some interesting light on the attitudes and behavior of the insurgents.

Beyond this, there are a number of specific problems that require careful analysis. Among the more important are the social composition of the fleet, the role of national discontent, the question of White involvement, and the nature of the rebel ideology. To some of these questions, of course, no definitive answers will be possible until the relevant Soviet archives are opened for inspection, an event not likely to occur for some time. Meanwhile, this volume attempts to provide as full an account of the rebellion as the available

5

INTRODUCTION

sources permit. Use has been made of a number of pertinent documents in Western archives, and also of published Soviet materials which have often been dismissed as mere propaganda but which, when used with proper caution, are of genuine value in illuminating some of the most significant issues.

It is important, above all, to examine the conflicting motives of the insurgents and their Bolshevik adversaries. The sailors, on the one hand, were revolutionary zealots, and like zealots throughout history they longed to recapture a past era before the purity of their ideals had been defiled by the exigencies of power. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, having emerged victorious from a bloody Civil War, were not prepared to tolerate any new challenge to their authority. Throughout the conflict each side behaved in accordance with its own particular goals and aspirations. To say this is not to deny the necessity of moral judgment. Yet Kronstadt presents a situation in which the historian can sympathize with the rebels and still concede that the Bolsheviks were justified in subduing them. To recognize this, indeed, is to grasp the full tragedy of Kronstadt.

6

1. The Crisis of War Communism

I n the autumn of 1920 Soviet Russia began an uneasy period of transition from war to peace. For more than six years the country had known continuous upheaval, but now, after world war, revolution, and civil war, the smoke was finally lifting. On October 12 the Soviet government concluded an armistice with Poland. Three weeks later the last of the White generals, Baron Peter Wrangel, was driven into the sea, and the Civil War, though it left the country tom and bleeding, was won. In the south, Nestor Makhno, the anarchist partisan, remained at large, but in November 1920 his once formidable army was dispersed and presented no further threat to the Moscow government. Siberia, the Ukraine, and Turkestan had been regained, along with the Donets coal basin and the Baku oilfields; and in February 192 1 a Bolshevik army would complete the reconquest of the Caucasus by capturing Tiflis and putting the Menshevik government of Georgia to flight. Thus, after three years of precarious existence, its fate hanging by a thread from day to day, the Soviet regime could boast effective control over the bulk of Russia's vast and far-flung territory.

The end of the Civil War signaled a new era in Soviet relations with other countries. The Bolsheviks, shelving their hopes of an imminent world upheaval, sought to obtain the "breathing spell" which had been denied them in 19 18 by the outbreak of civil conflict. Among the Western powers, by the same �oken, expectations of the impending collapse of Lenin's government had faded. Both sides

-desired more

normal relations, and by the end of 1920 there was no reason why this desire should not be realized; the Allied blockade having been lifted and armed intervention in European Russia brought to a halt, the most serious obstacles to diplomatic recognition and a resumption of trade had been removed. During the course of the year, moreover, formal peace

7

THE CRISIS OF WAR COMMUNISM

treaties had been concluded with Russia's Baltic neighbors,

Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania; and in February

192 1 peace and friendship pacts were signed with Persia

and Afghanistan, while a similar agreement with the Turks

was in the offing. Meanwhile, Soviet emissaries, notably

Krasin in London and Vorovsky in Rome, were negotiating

trade agreements with a number of European nations, and

the prospects were bright for a successful outcome.

And yet, for all these favorable developments, the winter

of 1920- 192 1 was an extremely critical period in Soviet his

tory. Lenin acknowledged this when he told the Eighth

Congress of Soviets, in December 1920, that a smooth tran

sition to peaceful 'economic and social reconstruction would

not be easy to accomplish.1 Although the military struggle

had been won and the external situation was rapidly improv

ing, the Bolsheviks faced grave internal difficulties. Russia

was exhausted and bankrupt. The scars of battle were visible

in every corner of the land. During the last two years the

death rate had mounted sharply, famine and pestilence

claiming millions of victims beyond the millions who had

fallen in combat. Not since the Time of Troubles in the

seventeenth century had the country seen such suffering and

devastation. Agricultural output had fallen off drastically;

industry and transportation were in a shambles. Russia, in

the words of a contemporary, had emerged from the Civil

War in a state of economic collapse "unparalleled in the

history of humanity. "2

The time had come to bind up the nation's wounds, and

for this a shift was needed in domestic policy to match the

relaxation already taking place in foreign affairs. Above

all, this meant the abandonment of "War Communism, " a

1 Vos'rnoi vserossiiskii s" ezd sovetov rabochikh, krest'ianskikh,

krasnoarrneiskikh i kazach'ikh deputatov: stenogra/icheskii otchel

(22-29 dekabria 1 920 goda) , Moscow, 1 92 1 , p. 1 6.

2 L. N. Kritsman, Geroicheskii period velikoi russkoi revoliutsii,

2nd edn., Moscow, 1926, p. 166.

8


program improvised to meet the emergency of the Civil War.

As its name implies, War Communism bore the harsh stamp

of regimentation and compulsion. Dictated by economic

scarcity and military necessity, it was marked by an extreme

centralization of government controls in every area of social

life. Its cornerstone was the forcible seizure of grain from

the peasantry. Armed detachments were sent into the coun

tryside to requisition surplus produce with which to feed

the cities and to provision the Red Army, a force of some

five million men. Though instructed to leave the peasants

enough for their personal needs, it was common for the

requisitioning squads to take at pistol-point grain intended

for personal consumption or set aside for the next sowing.

"The essence of 'War Communism,' " Lenin himself ad

mitted, "was that we actually took from the peasant all his

surpluses and sometimes not only the surpluses but part of

the grain the peasant needed for food. We took this in order

to meet the requirements of the army and to sustain the

workers."3 In addition to grain and vegetables, the food

detachments confiscated horses, fodder, wagons, and other

items for military use, often without payment of any kind,

so that the villagers had to go without such staples as sugar,

salt, and kerosene, not to mention soap, boots, matches, and

tobacco, or the nails and scrap metal needed for essential

repairs.

There is little doubt that compulsory requisitioning (in

Russian prodrazverstka) saved the Bolshevik regime from

defeat, for without it neither the army nor the urban popu

lation, from which the government drew its main support,

could have survived. Yet the inevitable price was the estrange

ment of the peasantry. Forced at gunpoint to hand over

their surpluses and denied the compensation of badly needed

consumer goods, the villagers responded in predictable fash

ion: the food detachments, when not met by open resistance,

3 Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochillenii, XLIII, 2 19 .

9


were stymied by evasive tactics to which every ounce of peasant ingenuity was applied. In 1920, a leading authority estimated, more than a third of the total harvest was. successfully hidden from the government's collection teams.4 The peasants, moreover, began to till only enough land to meet their own direct needs, so that by the end of 1920 the amount of sown acreage in European Russia was only three-fifths of the figure for 1913, the last normal year before the onset of war and revolution.5 A good part of this shrinkage was, of course, the result of the devastation which the Russian countryside had experienced, but the policy of prodrazverstka

certainly contributed to the catastrophic decline of agricultural production during the Civil War period. By 1921 total output had fallen to less than half, and the quantity of livestock to about two-thirds, of prewar figures. Particularly hard hit were such basic crops as flax and sugar beets, which had dwindled to between a fifth and a tenth of their normal levels.6

At the same time, forcible requisitioning rekindled the age-old struggle in Russia between the rural population and the urban-based state authority. Lenin had long ago realized that, given Russia's retarded economic and social condition, a tactical alliance with the peasantry was essential if his party was to win, and afterwards to retain, power. The Bolsheviks, at the. very least, had t6 keep the peasants neutral . It was this motive, primarily, that had led to the formation of a coalition government with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries in December 1917; and the same consideration may also have influenced the choice of M. I. Kalinin--one of the few Bolsheviks of some prominence whose peasant origins

4 Kritsman, Geroicheskii period velikoi russkoi revoliutsii, pp. 135-

3 9.

5 A. S. PukhoY, Kronshtadtskii m iatezh 1921 g., Leningrad, 1931, p. 8.

6 See Kritsman, Geroicheskii period velikoi russkoi revoliutsii, pp. 153-61.

10


were widely known-as president of the Soviet Republic. But the chief means of securing the peasants' support was to fulfill their ancient dream of a chernyi peredel, a general land distribution. The Bolshevik land decrees of October 26, 1917 and February 19, 1918 were in very close harmony with the populist and egalitarian urges of the rural folk. Borrowing the agrarian program of the Socialist Revolutionaries, whose doctrines were tailored to the aspirations of the peasantry, the young Soviet government abolished all

private holdings and ordered the land to be apportioned on an eqriafbasis among those who toiled on it with their own hands and without the assistance of hired labor.7 The two decrees gave new impetus to a process which the villagers had begun on their own several months before, during the summer of 1917, and by 1920 the land had been divided into more than 20 million small holdings worked by individual family units.

Small wonder, then, that the rural population greeted these initial Bolshevik measures with exultation, tempered only by their traditional wariness of official edicts emanating from the state. To the peasants the Bolshevik Revolution meant first and foremost the satisfaction of their land hunger and the elimination of the nobility, and now they wanted only to be left in peace. Entrenching themselves on their new holdings, they guarded suspiciously against any outside intrusions. Nor were these long in coming. As the Civil War deepened and requisition teams descended into the countryside, the peasants began to regard the Bolsheviks as adversaries rather than friends and benefactors. They complained that Lenin and his party had driven away the masters and given the people the land only to take away their produce and their freedom to use the land as they saw fit. The peasants, moreover, resented the state farms which the authori-

7 See E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, 3 vols.,

New York, 1 95 1 - 1 95 3 , II, 39-46.

11


ties had established on some of the larger gentry estates

during the Civil War period. For the villagers a true chernyi

peredel meant the division among the people of all the land.

It meant, too, the abolition of "wage slavery, " which the

state farms. perpetuated. �s Lenin himself put it, "the peas

ant thinks: if there are big farms, then I am once more a

hired laborer."8

As a result of these policies, more than a few peasants

came to believe that Bolsheviks and Communists were dif

ferent people. To the former they attributed the precious gift

of the land, while they bitterly accused the latter-particu

larly Trotsky, Zinoviev, and other Communist leaders whose

"alien" origins were well known-of imposing on them a

new form of bondage, this time to the state instead of the

nobility. "We are Bolsheviks not Communists. We are for

the Bolsheviks because they drove out the landlords, but we

are not for the Communists because they are against individ

ual holdings."9 Thus did Lenin describe the attitude of the

peasants in 1921. A year later their frame of mind, as a police

report from Smolensk province shows, had changed but little:

"Among the peasants there are no limits to the grumbling

against the Soviet government and the Communists. In the

conversatiOIl of every middle peasant and poor peasant, not

to speak even of the kulak, the following is heard, 'They

aren't planning freedom for us, but serfdom. The time of

Godunov has already begun, when the peasants were attached to the landowners. Now we [are attached] to the

Jewish bourgeoisie like Modkowski, Aronson, etc. ' "10

Yet the bulk of the peasants, for the duration of the Civil

War, continued to tolerate the Soviet regime as a lesser evil

than a White restoration. However acute their antipathy for

8 Lenin,. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, XXXVIII, 200.

9 Ibid., XLIV, 43. The Bolsheviks officially changed their name to

Communists in March 1 9 1 8 . 10 Merle Fainsod, Smolensk under Soviet Rule, Cambridge, Mass.,

1 95 8 , p. 4 3 .

12


the ruling party. still more did they fear a return of the gentry and the loss of their land. The food collection squads, it is true, often met with resistance in the villages, resistance which claimed more than a few Bolshevik lives, but the peasants shrank from armed opposition on a scale serious enough to threaten the existence of the government. However, with the defeat of Wrangel's army in the fall of 1920,

the situation changed rapidly. Now that the White danger had evaporated, peasant resentment against prodrazverstka and the state farms flared up out of control. Waves of peasant risings swept rural Russia. The most serious outbreaks occurred in Tambov province, the middle Volga area, the Ukraine, the northern Caucasus region, and western Siberia, peripheral sectors where government control was comparatively weak and popular violence had a long pedigree. 11

The rebellions gathered strength rapidly throughout the winter of 1920-1921. During this period, as Lenin noted, "tens and hundreds of thousands of disbanded soldiers" returned to their native villages and swelled t�_e ran�s o� _ the guerrilla forces.12 By early 1921 some 2,500,000 mennearly half the total strength of the Red Army-had been demobilized in an atmosphere of violence and social unrest which menaced the very fabric of the state. It was a pattern not unfamiliar elsewhere in Europe .during the years immediately after the First World War, when large-scale military demobilization aggravated existing economic tensions and sharpened popular discontent. But in Russia the situation was particularly grave. Nearly seven years of war, revolution, and civil disorder had bred a spirit of lawlessness that was difficult to eradicate. An uprooted civilian population had not yet settled down when the demobilization, as

11 A detailed survey of the peasant risings in various parts of

Soviet Russia is given in I. la. Trifonov, Klassy i klassovaia bor'ba v SSSR v nachale nepa (1921-1 923 gg.) , Vol. I: Bor'ba s vooruzhennoi

kulatskoi kontrrevoliutsiei, Leningrad, 1 964. 12 Desiatyi s"ezd RKP(b ), mart 1921 goda, Moscow, 1 963 , p. 23 .

13


Lenin remarked, set loose a horde of restless men whose sole occupation was warfare and who naturally turned their energies to banditry and rebellion. For Lenin the ,situation was tantamount to a revival of the Civil War, but in a different and more dangerous form-more dangerous, as he saw it, because it was being waged not by bankrupt social elements whose time in history had run out, but by the popular masses themselves. The specter of an enormous jacquerie, a new Pugachev revolt, "blind and pitiless" in Pushkin's celebrated phrase, had appeared to haunt the government-and this at a moment when the towns, the traditional centers of Bolshevik support, were in a depleted and weakened condition and themselves gripped by profound unrest.

Between November 1920 and March 1921, the number of rural outbreaks mounted sharply. In February 1921 alone, on the eve of the Kronstadt rebellion, the Cheka reported 118

separate peasant ,risings in various parts of the country.13 In western Siberia the tide of rebellion engulfed nearly the entire Tiumen region and much of the neighboring provinces of Cheliabinsk, Orenburg, and Omsk. Communications along the Trans-Siberian railroad were seriously disrupted, aggravating the already severe food shortages in the large cities of European Russia. Along the middle Volga, where Stenka Razin and Pugachev had won their greatest followings, bands of armed marauders-peasants, army veterans, desertersroamed the countryside in search of food and plunder. Only a thin line separated brigandage from social revolt. Every-: where desperate men ambushed requisitioning detachments and fought with savage determination against all who dared to interfere with them. The fiercest struggle, perhaps, occurred in the black-earth province of Tambov, a hotbed of peasant revolt since the seventeenth century. Led by A. S. Antonov, a former Socialist Revolutionary whose talents as

13 Seth Singleton, "The Tambov Revolt ( 1 920- 1 92 1 ) ," Slavic R e

view, xxv (September 1 966 ) , 499.

14


a partisan warrior and reputation as a Robin Hood rivaled

those of Nestor Makhno, the rebellion raged out of control for

more than a year until the capable Red Commander, Mikhail

Tukhachevsky, fresh from crushing the sailors' revolt in

Kronstadt, arrived with a large force to subdue it. 14 Apart from the. high incidence of peasant insurrection

during the winter of 1920-1921, one is struck by the large

number of men drawn into the rebel ranks. At its height,

Antonov's movement counted some 50,000 insurgents, while

in a single district of western Siberia the guerrillas, accord

ing to sources not likely to exaggerate, numbered as many

as 60,000.15 Simple peasants� armed with axes, cudgels,

pitchforks, and a scattering of rifles and pistols, fought

pitched battles. with regular army formations, their desperate

courage inspiring so high a rate of defection anlOng the gov

ernment troops-many of whom shared their social back

ground and attitudes-that special Cheka units and Com

munist officer cadets, whose loyalty was beyond doubt, had

to be called in. Lacking up-to-date weapons and effective

organization, the scattered peasant bands were in the end

no match for the seasoned Red forces. The insurgents, more

over, had no coherent program, though everywhere their

slogans were the same: "Down with requisitioning," "Away

with food detachments," "Don't surrender your surpluses,"

"Down with the Communists and the Jews." Beyond this,

they shared a common hatred of the cities, from which the

commissars and food detachments came, and of the govern

ment which sent these intruders into their midst. The pop�la

tion of Tambov, noted a Bolshevik military commander in

that province, regarded Soviet authority as the begetter of

14 See ibid., pp. 497-5 1 2; and Antonovshchina, Tambov, 1 923.

15 Trifonov, Klassy i klassovaia bor'ba v SSSR, I, 4-5; Iu. A.

Poliakov, Pel'ekhod k nepu i sovctskoe krest'ianstvo, Moscow, 1 967,

pp. 205-206. The Trotsky Archives at Harvard University contain

a number of documents relating to these peasant risings of 1920-

1921.

15


"raiding commissars and officials," a tyrannical force estranged from the lives of the people. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that one of the rebel groups in Tambov should have set as its primary goal "the overthrow of the rule of the Communists-Bolsheviks, who have brought the country to poverty, death, and disgrace. "16

Although armed resistance and evasion of food levies were their strongest weapons, the peasants brought yet another traditional means of protest into play: humble petitions to the central government. Between November 1920 and March 1921, the authorities in Moscow were bombarded with urgent appeals from every region of the country, demanding an end t" the coercive policies of War Communism. Now that the Whites had been defeated, argued the petitioners, the forcible requisitioning of grain had lost its justification. In its place the peasants called for a fixed tax on their produce and the right to dispose of surpluses as they saw fit. And, as an added incentive for production, they requested an increase in the supply of consumer goods to the countryside.17

These grass-roots appeals, however, found few sympathetic ears within Soviet administrative circles, where the peasant smallholder was widely regarded as an incurable petty bourgeois who, having obtained possession of the land, had ceased to support the revolution. More than anything else, the Bolsheviks feared a capitalist entrenchment in the Russian village. Ever mindful of historical parallels, they recalled the peasantry of 1848, who had served as the bulwark of reaction in Western Europe, and they shrank from any concessions which might increase the strength of the independent peasant proprietor in their own country. For more than a few Bolsheviks, moreover, the system of War Com-

16 Singleton, "The Tambov Revolt," Slavic Review, xxv, 500; Kak

tambovskie krest'iane boriatsia za svobodu, n.p., 192 1 , pp. 1 2- 1 3 . 17 Poliakov, Perekhod k nepu, pp. 2 1 3ft

16


mWlism, with its centralized state direction of the economy, bore the essential hallmarks of the socialist society of their dreams, and they were loath to give it up for a restoration of the free market and a solidly entrenched peasantry.

A forceful exponent of this viewpoint was Valerian Osinsky (real name Obolensky), a leader of the left-wing Democratic Centralist group within the Communist party. Osinsky set forth his position in a series of influential articles which appeared during the latter part of 1920. Rejecting any retreat to a tax in kind or a revival of free trade, he called for greater rather than less state intervention in agricultural life. The only solution to the peasant agrarian crisis, he wrote, lay in the "compulsory mass organization of production" under the direction and control of government officials.1s To achieve this, he proposed the formation of "sowing committees" in every locality, with the primary mission of raising output by extending the area under the plough. The new committees would also regulate the use of equipment, the methods of planting, the care of livestock, and other matters affecting the efficiency of production. Osinsky further suggested that the peasants be required to pool their seed grain in a common seed bank, distribution from which would be determined by the government. His ultimate vision was a system of socialized farming in which all small holdings would be collectivized and agricultural labor performed on a common basis.

What Osinsky's recommendations implied was not merely the retention of War Communism but its reinforcement in virtually every phase of rural life. Far from pacifying the peasants, his proposals only gave them new cause for alarm, and they were not long in making their voices heard. An opportunity arose at the end of December 1920, when the Eighth Congress of Soviets assembled in Moscow. Osinsky's

18 N. Osinskii, Gosudarstvennoe regulirovanie krest'ianskogo khozia

istva, Moscow, 1920, pp. 8-9.

17


scheme occupied a central place in the deliberations. Although the Communist majority endorsed the plan by an overwhelming margin, vocal opposition came from the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, who were making their last appearance at a national gathering of this sort. Fyodor Dan and David Dallin for the Mensheviks, and V. K. Volsky and I. N. Steinberg for the Right and Left SR's, were unanimous in condemning the "bankrupt" policies of War Communism. They called for the immediate replacement of food requisitioning by a fixed tax in kind, with freedom of trade for surpluses in excess of the peasant's obligations to the state. Any approach founded on compulsion, argued Dan, would only hasten the decline in the sown area and further curtail the output of badly needed grain ; the continued application of force would widen the gulf between town and village, driving the peasantry into the arms of the counterrevolution. In a similar vein, Vol sky urged the government to encourage voluntary cooperatives and to abandon the state farms which the peasants so bitterly opposed. And Dallin, referring to Osinsky's sowing committees, warned that any new ins�.i. ument of coercion would only aggravate the existing crisis.19

Further objections to the government's agricultural policies were voiced by the peasants themselves at a closed session of rural delegates to the congress. Lenin personally attended, and the notes which he passed on to the party Central Committee and the Council of People's Commissars are of enormous interest. Opposition to Osinsky's project, as Lenin's notes reveal, was unanimous and unsparing. With unhidden contempt, a peasant from Siberia-a region already deep in the throes of peasant rebellion-denounced the idea of sowing committees and of increased state interference in village affairs : "Osinsky does not know Siberia. I have been ploughing there for thirty-eight years, but Osinsky knows

19 Vos'rnoi vserossiiskii s"ezd sovetov, pp. 3 7-43, 50-57, 1 22-23,

200-201.

18


nothing." Other delegates assailed the government's efforts to collectivize agriculture, but their worst venom was reserved for the confiscation of grain by armed detachments which, determined to fulfill their arbitrary quotas, made no distinction between the idler and the hard-working peasant. So much grain was being taken, said one delegate, that neither humans nor animals had anything to eat. A peasant from Tula protested that, owing to excessive confiscations, ten of the black-soil provinces of central Russia (including his own) had been left without seed for the next planting. If food production is to be raised, said a delegate from Perm, we must be freed from this lash of compulsory requisitioning.

One after another the speakers protested that little or no compensation was given for their produce. "If you want us to saw all the land," declared a peasant from Minsk province, "just give us salt and iron. I shall not say anything more." We need horses, wheels, harrows, other voices chimed in. Give us metal to mend our tools and sheds, or give us hard cash with real value to pay the blacksmith and the carpenter. A

delegate from Kostroma province spoke the mind of the

whole group when he declared : "The peasant must be given

incentives, otherwise he won't work. I can saw wood under

the lash, but one cannot cultivate under the lash." "How to

provide incentive?" asked a peasant from Novgorod. "Simple :

a fixed percent of requisitioning for grain as well as cattle."20

Lenin himself was by no means indifferent to the plight

of the peasantry. When he learned, for example, that the

peasants of a particular district had been subjected to ex

cessive confiscations and deprived of their seed grain, he

personally intervened in their behalf.21 As early as November

1920 he had even begun to consider the possibility of "the

20 Lenin, Polnoe wbranie sochinenii, XLII, 382-86. 21 See his note of October 2 1 , 1 920 to the Deputy Food Com

missar, N. P. Briukhanov : ibid., LI, 3 1 3.

19


transformation of food requisitioning into a tax in kind,"22

which is precisely what the villagers themselves were demanding. But, for the moment at least, he rejected such a step as premature. For the danger of a resumption of the Civil War, he told the Eighth Congress of Soviets, had not completely evaporated. A formal peace with Poland had yet to be concluded; and Wrangel's army, supplied by the French, remained poised in neighboring Turkey, ready to strike at the first convenient opportunity. Obviously, then, the transition to a new peacetime economic program must not be too hasty.23 On an earlier occasion Lenin had illustrated this point with a Russian fable. Speaking before an assembly of rural representatives from Moscow province in October 1920, he admitted (to cries of agreement from the audience) that the peasantry was groaning under a heavy burden of taxation, a burden which had caused a serious rift between town and country, between worker and peasant. But if the ram and goat fall out, Lenin asked, referring to the proletariat and peasantry, must the lynx of counterrevolution be allowed to devour them both?24

Thus, in spite of increasing doubts, Lenin clung fast to the old policies of War Communism. In December 1920, at the Eighth Congress of Soviets, he placed his seal of approval on Osinsky's project for a public seed bank and a sowing campaign in the coming spring. The congress thereupon passed a resolution calling for a "statewide plan of compulsory sowing" under the general direction of the

Commissariat of Agriculture. Sowing committees were to be

established in every province, district, and township, charged

with marshalling all available manpower and equipment in

order to extend the area of land under cultivation.25 But,

22 Ibid., XLII, 5 1.

23 Vos'rnoi vserossiiskii s" ezd sovetov, pp. 1 Off. 24 Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, XLI, 362-6 3 .

25 Vos'rnoi vserossiiskii s" ezd sovetov, p. 268.

20


for the present at least, Lenin considered any further attempt to collectivize agriculture unfeasible. He no longer believed that socialism was attainable in the near future. Russia, he told the Eighth Congress of Soviets. remained a country of small peasants, and peasants "are not socialists." To treat them as such was to build the future of Russia on shifting sand. Although the Sukharevka (Moscow's famous black market) had been shut down, its spirit lived on in the heart of every petty proprietor. "So long as we are living in a country of small peasants," said Lenin� "capitalism in Russia shall have a stronger economic base than communism." But if the transition to socialism was to be long and difficult, he added, all the more reason not to retreat before the capitalist forces in the countryside. Thus compulsion rather than concession remained the watchword of Bolshevik agricultural policy. 26

THE situation in the towns, hitherto the main stronghold of Bolshevik support, was in many ways worse than in the countryside. Six years of turmoil had shattered the nation's industrial economy. Although published statistics vary in many details, the picture which emerges is one of near collapse.27 By the end of 1920 total industrial output had shrunk to about a fifth of 1913 levels. The supply of fuel and raw materials had reached a particularly critical state. Although the Baku oilfields and the Donets coal basin had been recovered in the spring and autumn of 1920, damage was extensive and very difficult to repair. Many of the mines were flooded and other enterprises destroyed. The total

26 Ibid., p. 3 0.

27 Za 5 let, 1917-1922: sbornik Ts.K.R .K.P., Moscow, 1 922, p. 408 ;

Kritsman, Geroicheskii period velikoi russkoi revoliutsii, pp. 1 63-64.

Cf. the figures in N. A. Kornatovskii, ed . , Kronshtadtskii miatezh:

sbornik statei, vospominanii i dokumentov, Leningrad, 1 9 3 1 , pp. 8-9 ;

and in Grazhdanskaia voina, 1 9 1 8- 1 92 1 , 3 vols., Moscow, 1 928- 1 930,

I, 36 1 .

21


production of coal in Russia at the end of 1920 was only a quarter, and of oil only a third, of prewar levels. Still worse, cast iron output had dropped to less than 3 percent of 19 13 levels, and the production of copper had all but ceased. Lacking these basic materials, the major industrial centers of the country were forced to cut back production very severely. Many large factories could operate only part-time, and their work forces dwindled to fractions of what they had been four or five years earlier. Some important sectors of heavy industry ground to a complete standstill. And in consumergoods enterprises total production fell to less than a quarter of prewar levels. The manufacture of footwear was reduced to a tenth of normal, and only one in twenty textile spindles remained in operation.

Compounding the disaster were two additional factors : the throttling effects of the recent Allied blockade and the disorganization of the country's transportation system. Imposed after the Brest-Litovsk treaty in 1918, the blockade was finally lifted in 1920, but foreign trade was not revived until the following year, and even then on a very small scale. As a result, Soviet Russia was deprived of badly needed technical equipment, machinery, and raw materials, the absence of which prevented a rapid recovery of the industrial system.

At the same time, transportation facilities were seriously dis

rupted. In much of the country, railway lines had been tom

up and bridges destroyed by retreating armies. Trotsky, who

reported on the transport situation to the Eighth Congress of

Soviets, noted that more than half the locomotives in Russia

were in disrepair; and the production of new engines had

dropped to 15 percent of the 1913 figure. 28 The supply of

normal fuel being at best intermittent, railwaymen were re-

28 Vos'moi vserossiiskii s"ezd sovetov, p. 1 60 ; Za 5 let, p. 408. All

told, 3 ,762 railway bridges and 3 ,597 road bridges were destroyed, as

well as some 1 ,200 miles of railroad and 60,000 miles of telegraph

wire : Erich Wollenberg, The R ed A rmy, London, 1 93 8, p. 1 1 0. 22


duced to running the trains on wood, and this increased the number of breakdowns. Nearly everywhere communications were severely impaired, and in some districts total paralysis had set in.

The breakdown of the railroads held back the delivery of food to the hungry cities. Provisions became so scarce that workmen and other townspeople were put on starvation rations. The small quantities of food on hand were distributed according to a preferential system which, originally designed to favor workers in arms industries, was retained even after the Civil War had ended. Thus, at the beginning of 1 92 1 , the workers of Petrograd's metal-smelting shops and blast furnaces (goriachie tsekhi) received a daily ration of 800 grams of black bread, while shock workers ( udarniki )

received 600 grams, and lesser categories only 400 or even 200 grams.29 But even this meager allotment was doled out on an irregular basis. The diet of transport workers was said to average between 700 and 1 ,000 calories a day,30 a figure far below the minimum necessary to sustain a full day's labor.

The food crisis in the towns was greatly complicated by the disintegration of the regular market during the Civil War period. Under the system of War Communism, all private trade was abolished, and the normal exchange of goods between town and country virtually ceased to exist. In its place, a black market quickly sprang into being. Swarms of "bagmen" tramped from village to village, buying bread and vegetables which they would sell or barter to the famished inhabitants of the cities. By the end of 1 920 illicit trade had grown to such proportions that it largely supplanted the official channels of distribution. At the same time, inflation mounted to dizzying heights. During 1 920 alone the price of bread increased more than tenfold.31 The Soviet government,

29 Lazarevich, "Kronshtadtskoe vosstanie," Borba, 1 92 1 , Nos.

1 -2, pp. 3-5.

30 Pukhov, Kronshtadtskii miatezh, p. 2 3 .

31 A . Slepkov, Kronshtadtskii miatezh, Moscow, 1 928, p. 1 3 .

23


in order to meet its own expenses, set its printing presses to work at a furious pace, and as a result of this action a gold ruble worth 7 paper rubles and 85 kopecks in 1917 brought at least 10,000 paper rubles three years later.32 By the end of 1920 the real wages of factory workers in Petro grad had, according to official estimates, fallen to 8.6 percent of their prewar levels. 33 As the value of money drained away, an increasing proportion of wages was paid to the workers in kind. The food ration (payok) came to form the nucleus of the workman's wage, in addition to which he received shoes and clothing from the government and sometimes a fraction of his output, which was normally bartered for food.

Still, the factory hands seldom had enough to nourish themselves and their families, and they joined the droves of city folk who were abandoning their homes and flocking to the countryside in search of food. Between October 1917 and August 1920 (when a new census was taken) , the population of Petrograd fell from almost 2.5 million to about three-quarters of a million, a drop of nearly two-thirds. During the same period Moscow lost nearly half its inhabitants, while the total urban population of Russia declined by about a third. A good proportion of these migrants were industrial workers who drifted back to their native villages and reverted to their former peasant existence. In August 1920 Petrograd, for example, was left with only a third of the nearly 300,000 factory hands of which it could boast three years before, and the overall decrease of workingmen throughout Russia exceeded 50 percent.84 Part of this dramatic decline was attributable, of course, to the high death rate at the front, and part to the large number who returned to their

32 Pukhov, Kronshtadtskii miatezh, p. 1 l .

3 3 Ibid., p . 23 ; Lazarevich, "Kronshtadtskoe vosstanie," Borba,

1 92 1 , Nos. 1 -2, pp. 3-5.

84 The above statistics are derived from Krasnaia Gazeta, February 9, 1 92 1 ; Kritsman, Geroicheskii period velikoi russkoi revoliutsii, p. 52; and Pukhov, Kronshtadtskii miatezh, p. 1 9 .

24


villages to share in the division of land; the dislocation of industry and the lack of fuel and clothing also contributed to the exodus. But the majority went to seek food, especially during 1919 and 1920, when supplies in the cities rapidly approached starvation levels.

Even among those who chose to remain behind, many workers reestablished old ties with their village, making periodic trips for food or returning during illness or to assist with the harvest. Ironically, this took place at a moment when, according to the ideological canons of the Bolshevik party, the country should have been acquiring an increasingly urban and industrial character. But instead, owing to the effects of the land partition and of the Civil War, Russia in large measure reverted to the primitive agrarian society from which it had only recently begun to emerge. For the Soviet government, ruling as it did in the name of the industrial proletariat, the situation was fraught with dangerous implications. Not only did the shift of people from the city to the village dilute the social basis of Bolshevik authority, but the renewed contact between peasants and workers served to heighten existing popular tensions. The grievances of the peasants caused very strong reactions among the urban visitors, who were able to see with their own eyes the impact of War Communism in the countryside. And disaffection quickly spread from the peasants and workers to their plebeian cousins in the army and navy. The result was a mounting wave of rural disturbances, industrial agitation, and military unrest, which was to reach an explosive climax at Kronstadt in March 1 92 1 .

Meanwhile, the condition of the cities and towns continued to deteriorate. By the beginning of 1 921 the very elements of city life were falling apart. Because of the fuel crisis, workshops, dwellings, and offices went without heat through the unusually severe winter months. Warm clothing and footgear were nowhere to be bought, and one heard of people

25


freezing to death in unheated apartments. Typhus and cholera swept the cities, taking an alarming toll. But food remained the worst problem : in spite of the sharp decline in urban population, there was still not enough to go around. Laborers were sapped of their physical energy and fell victim to every form of demoralization. By the end of 1920 average productivity had sunk to a third of the 1913 rate. 35 Driven by cold and hunger, men abandoned their machines for days on end to gather wood and forage for food in the surrounding countryside. Traveling on foot or in overcrowded railway cars, they brought their personal possessions, and materials which they had filched from the factories, to exchange for whatever food they could get. The government did all it could to stop this illegal trade. Armed roadblock detachments (zagraditel'nye otriady) were deployed to guard the approaches to the cities and to confiscate the precious sacks of food which the "speculators" were carrying back to their families. The brutality of the roadblock detachments was a byword throughout the country, and complaints about their arbitrary methods flooded the commissariats in Moscow. 36

Another major grievance of the working class was the growing regimentation of labor under the system of War Communism. The driving force behind this development was Trotsky, the Commissar of War. Encouraged by his success in whipping the hastily improvised Red Army into shape, Trotsky sought to apply similar methods of military discipline to the crumbling industrial economy. In January 1920 the Council of People'S Commissars, largely at Trotsky'S instigation, decreed a general labor obligation for all ablebodied adults and, at the same time, authorized the assign-

35 S. N. Prokopovitch, The Economic Condition of Soviet Russia,

London, 1924, pp. 20-25. See also K. Leites, R ecent Economic De

velopments in Russia, London . 1 922, pp. 1 3 1 ff.

36 See Alexander Berkman, The Kronstadt Rebellion, Berlin, 1 922,

p. 1 0.

26


ment of idle military personnel to civilian work. As the Civil War drew to a close, whole detachments of Red Army soldiers, instead of being discharged, were kept on as "labor armies" and set to work to relieve the growing fuel and transport crises and to rescue basic industry from collapse. Thousands of veterans were employed in cutting timber, mining coal, and repairing railway lines, while thousands more were assigned to heavy tasks in the large urban factories. Meanwhile, an attempt was made to reinforce labor discipline among the civilian working force in order to curtail pilfering and absenteeism and to raise individual productivity. The results of these policies, however, were disappointing. As might be expected, the tightening of discipline and the presence of troops in the factories were strongly resented by the regular workmen, provoking a shrill outcry in workshop and union meetings against the "militarization of labor." And the soldiers, for their part, were anxious to go home now that the war was over. To many Russians it seemed that the "militarization of labor" had lost its justification at the very moment when the government was seeking to extend it. Menshevik leaders compared the new regimentation to Egyptian slavery, when the Pharaohs used forced labor to build the pyramids. Compulsion, they insisted, would achieve no more success in industry than in agriculture. 37 To the alarm of government observers, such arguments were winning a sympathetic response among the industrial rank and file, whose disillusionment with the Bolsheviks and their program of War Communism was approaching the point of open demonstrations against the regime.

The "militarization of labor" was part of a wider effort

to impose central control over the nation's faltering economy.

37 See James Bunyan, The Origin of Forced Labor in the Soviet

State, 1917-1921: Documents and Materials, Baltimore, 1 967, pp. 89ff., 1 3 5-36.

27


During 1917 and 1918 the industrial workers had put into practice the syndicalist slogan of "workers' control" over production. 38 What this meant was that local factory and shop committees supervised the hiring and firing of labor, participated in fixing wages, hours, and working conditions, and in general kept watch over the activities of the administration. In some enterprises unpopular directors, engineers, and foremen were ejected, and the workers' committees took upon themselves the tasks of management, usually with disastrous results. By the summer of 1918 effective administration had all but vanished from Russian industry, and the country was moving towards the brink of economic collapse. The Bolsheviks, who had encouraged workers' control in 1917 as a means of undermining the Provisional Government, were now compelled to act lest they themselves should be engulfed by the same elemental tide which had swept away their predecessors. Thus, beginning in June 1918, the larger factories were nationalized, and workers' control was gradually abandoned in favor of one-man management and strict labor discipline. By November 1920 four out of five large enterprises were back under individual direction, and nationalization had been extended to most small factories and shops. 39

Wherever possible, "bourgeois specialists" were returned to their duties in order to provide badly needed technical advice and supervision. Before the year was out the ratio of whitecollar employees to manual laborers was nearly double that of 1917.40 A new bureaucracy had begun to flourish. It was a mixed lot, veteran administrative personnel rubbing shoulders with untrained neophytes ; yet however disparate their

38 See Paul Avrich, "The Bolshevik Revolution and Workers' Con

trol in Russian Industry," Slavic Review, XXII ( March 1 963 ) , 47-63.

39 Kritsman, Geroicheskii period velikoi russkoi revoliutsii, p. 206.

40 Ibid., pp. 1 97-98. On February 2, 1 92 1 , Lenin complained that

"the population of Moscow is being swollen by employees" and said that something must be done about it : Lenin, Polnoe sobranie

sochinenii, LIT, 65.

28


values and outlook, they shared vested interests of their own that set them apart from the workers at the bench.

For the rank-and-file workmen, the restoration of the class enemy to a dominant place in the factory meant a betrayal of the ideals of the revolution. As they saw it, their dream of a proletarian democracy, momentarily realized in 1 9 1 7, had been snatched away and replaced by the coercive and bureaucratic methods of capitalism. The Bolsheviks had imposed "iron discipline" in the factories, established armed squads to enforce the will of management, and contemplated using such odious efficiency methods as the "Taylor system." That this should be done by a government which they had trusted and which professed to rule in their name was a bitter pill for the workers to swallow. Small wonder that, during the winter of 1 920- 1 92 1 , when economic and social dislocation reached a critical point, murmurings of discontent could no longer be silenced, not even by threats of expulsion with the loss of rations. At workshop meetings, where speakers angrily denounced the militarization and bureaucratization of industry, critical references to the comforts and privileges of Bolshevik officials drew indignant shouts of agreement from the listeners. The Communists, it was said, always got the best jobs and seemed to suffer less from hunger and cold than everyone else. Anti-Semitism and anti-intellectualism began to rear their heads, often simultaneously ; the charge was made that the Bolsheviks were an alien breed of Jewish intellectuals who had betrayed the Russian people and contaminated the purity of the revolution.

This growing mood of bitterness and disillusionment coincided with a period of acute controversy within the Communist party itself, where opposition to the policies of War Communism was not lacking. The controversy, which continued from December 1 920 to March 1 92 1 , reaching a climax at the Tenth Party Congress while the Kronstadt rebellion was in progress, centered on the role of the trade

29


unions in Soviety society. 41 During the prolonged and turbulent dispute, three conflicting positions emerged. Trotsky, guided by the military conception of manpower which he had formed as Commissar of War, favored the coniplete subordination of the unions to the state, which alone would enjoy the authority to appoint and dismiss union officials. The staunchest opponents of this plan were members of the Workers' Opposition, a group composed largely of workers and former workers (notably Alexander Shliapnikov and Yuri Lutovinov) who had retained their proletarian allegiance and sympathies. What the Workers' Opposition found particularly disturbing was the apparent drift of the Soviet regime towards a new bureaucratic state dominated by a privileged nonproletarian minority. Shliapnikov, Lutovinov, Alexandra Kollontai, and their sympathizers decried the militarization of the labor force and the inauguration of one-man management in the factories. They demanded not only full independence of the trade unions from state and party control, but the transfer of industrial administration to the unions and their local factory committees, which were to be organized into an all-Russian Congress of Producers. The party, they insisted, must not allow the creative initiative of the workers to become "crippled by the bureaucratic machine which is saturated with the spirit of routine of the bourgeois capitalist system of production and control."42

Lenin and his supporters (who formed a large majority of the party's membership) sought to heal the breach between Trotsky's appeal for the subjugation of the trade unions and the syndicalist program of the Workers' Opposition. As they

41 For good discussions of the trade union controversy, see Robert

v. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution, Cambridge, Mass. ,

1 960, pp. 1 19-3 6 ; and Isaac Deutscher, Soviet Trade Unions, London,

1 9 50, pp. 42-52.

42 Alexandra Kollontai, The Workers' Opposition in Russia, Chi

cago, 1 92 1 , pp. 22-2 3 . Cf. the theses of the Workers' Opposition group

in Pravda, January 25, 192 1 .

30


saw it, the unions m ust neither be absorbed into the state apparatus nor granted control over industry ; rather, they

should be allowed to retain a real measure of autonomy, with the right to choose their own leaders and engage in free discussion of labor problems, while the government continued to hold the reins of the economy in its own hands. Lenin hoped that his compromise proposals would succeed in bringing the other groups together. He was deeply disturbed by the dispute, which threatened, at so critical a moment in Soviet history, to sh atter the party's fragile unity. "We m ust have the courage to look the bitter truth in the face," ·he said in January 1 92 1 , at the height of the controversy. "The party is sick. The party is shaking with fever." Unless it can cure its illness "quickly and radical ly," he warned, there will occur "an inevitable split" that might prove fatal to the revolution.43

THE debates within the Com munist party reflected the rising

tensions within Russian society as a whole as the winter months advanced. For the past three years the people had

waged a desperate struggle to preserve the fruits of the revolution and to achieve a freer and more comfortable life.

Once the enemy had been defeated, they believed, the government would promptly release them from the rigors of wartime discipline, and before long the system of War Communism would become a fading memory of a troubled era which had passed into history. But nothing of the sort took place . When the Civil War was won, the policies of War Communism were neither abandoned nor even relaxed. Months after Wrangel's defeat, the government showed little

sign of restoring elementary liberties, either economic or political. The overriding thrust of Bol shevik policy, rather, remained in the direction of compulsion and rigid control . As a result, a feeling of bitter disappointment rapidly set in .

43 Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, XLII, 234.

31


It was this feeling which lay at the heart of the unfolding crisis. Even those who conceded that War Communism had served a necessary purpose, that during the life-and-death struggle against the Whites it had saved the army from defeat and the towns from starvation, were convinced that compulsion had outlived its usefulness. In their eyes, War Communism had been nothing more than a temporary expedient to meet an emergency situation ; as a peacetime program it was an abysmal failure and a burden which the people would no longer tolerate.

Yet the Bolsheviks were not willing to scrap it any more than they were willing to halt the smothering of political opposition. By way of justification, party spokesmen insisted that the wartime emergency had not yet passed, that the country remained isolated and beset by powerful enemies on every side, ready to pounce at the first sign of internal weakness. But each repressive measure, even when dictated by economic or political urgency, further undermined the government's democratic and egalitarian pretensions. Critical voices argued that it was the Bolsheviks themselves who were betraying the ideals of the revolution. For Alexander Berkman, a leading anarchist who had supported the Soviet regime during the Civil War, the slogans of 191 7 had been forsworn, the people's most cherished hopes trampled underfoot. Injustice prevailed on every hand, he wrote in 1921, and alleged exigency had been made the cloak of treachery, deceit, and oppression ; the Bolsheviks, while ruling in the name of the workers and peasants, were destroying the initiative and self-reliance on which the revolution depended for its growth, indeed for its very survival. 44

Berkman's sentiments were widely shared by other parties of the Left, which, like the anarchists, had been rudely

44 Alexander Berkman, The Bolshevik Myth (Diary 1 920-1922 ) , New York, 1 925, p . 3 1 9 ; Berkman, The "A nti-Climax," Berlin, 1 925,

p . 1 2 .

32


shunted aside after the Bolshevik seizure of power. In a speech to the Eighth Congress of Soviets, the Menshevik leader Fyodor Dan went so far as to charge that, with the stifling of popular initiative, the whole system of soviets had ceased to function except as a mere facade for a one-party dictatorship. Free speech and assembly, said Dan, had been brutally suppressed , citizens imprisoned or banished without trial, and political executions carried out on a m ass scale . Decrying these terrorist practices, he dem anded the immediate restoration of political and civil liberties and called for new elections to the soviets in every locality. Dan's appeal was echoed in a speech by the prominent Left SR 1. N. Steinberg. Himself a former Commissar of Justice in the Soviet government, Steinberg called for the revival of "soviet democracy" with broad autonomy and self-direction on the

local level . 45 Here, in effect, was the old Leninist demand for "all power

to the soviets," now being turned against the Bolsheviks by

their left-wing critics. Within the very ranks of the Commu

nist party the Democratic Centralists advocated more power to the local soviets as a cure for the excessive centralization of political authority during the Civil War. Nor were such

appeals confined to a handful of radical intellectuals . Durin g the winter months popular anger developed on a wide

front, embracing sailors and soldiers as well as peasants and

workers, who yearned for the anarchic freedom of 1 9 1 7

while craving at the same time a restoration of social stabil

ity and an end to bloodshed and economic privation. Out

of these somewhat contradictory aspirations there arose one

of the most serious internal crises that the Bolsheviks had

faced since their assumption of power. By March 1 92 1 the

Soviet regime was in danger of being swept away by a swell

ing w ave of peasant insurrections, l abor disturbances, and

45 Vos'moi \'serossiiskii s" ez.d SOl'etOl ' , pp, 55-57 , 1 22-2 3 ,

33


military ferment which reached their culmination in the Kronstadt uprising.

Above all, it was hunger and deprivation that had set the stage for the crisis, and it is easy to criticize the Bolsheviks for their failure to provide relief by abandoning the system of War Communism. Yet, no less than the governments of the West, they needed time to assess the new situation that confronted them. The transition from war to peace, as Lenin told the Eighth Congress of Soviets, was no simple matter. No one was sure which course of action was best; there was no strategic blueprint, no precedent to follow. From the moment the Bolsheviks took power, their policies had been groping, experimental, uncertain ; and now, more than three years later, improvisation continued to mark their discussions and actions. Some of the party's leaders, including Lenin himself, had in fact begun to contemplate a moderation of War Communism as early as November 1920, but at that time it had been far from evident-as it was to become only two or three months later-that an immediate reorientation was necessary to avert a major social upheaval.

Yet the fact remains that a relaxation in domestic affairs was too long in coming. Still in the grip of a wartime psychology, and unwilling to give up a program which suited their ideological preconceptions, the Bolsheviks clung to the policies of War Communism and did not let go until February 1921, when Lenin took the first steps towards setting a New Economic Policy in motion. By then, however, it was too late to avoid the tragedy of Kronstadt.

34

2. Petrograd and Kronstadt

In February 1 92 1 an open breach occurred between the Bolshevik regime and its principal m ainstay of support, the working class. Since the onset of winter, an unusually severe one even by Muscovite standards, cold and hunger, combinedwith the undiminished rigors of War Communism, had produced a highly charged atmosphere in the large towns. Thiswas particularly true of Moscow and Petro grad, where only

a single spark was needed to set off an explosion. It wasprovided on January 22, when the government announcedthat the already meager bread ration for the cities wouldimmediately be cut by one-third . 1 Severe though it was, thereduction apparently waf unavoidable. Heavy snows andshortages of fuel had held up food trains from Siberia and the northern Caucasus, where surpluses had been gathered to feed the hungry towns of the center and n orth. During the first ten days of February, the disruption of railway links

became so complete that not a single carload of grain reached the empty warehouses of Moscow. 2 But the fact that the cut

in rations had been dictated by urgent and unforeseeable circumstances did little to diminish its impact on the starving urban population. An outburst of some sort seemed inevitable.

The first serious trouble erupted in Moscow during the middle of February. It began with a rash of spontaneous factory meetings, at which angry workmen called for the immediate scrapping of War Communism in favor of a system of "free labor." So assertive was this demand that the government sent emiss aries to the factories to try to justify its

policies. This, however, was no easy task. Facing extremely hostile audiences, the official spokesmen were seldom allowed to finish their remarks before being driven from the

1 Pravda, January 22, 1 92 1 .

2 Poliakov, Perekhod k nepu, p. 23 3 .

35

PETROGRAD AND KRONSTADT

platform to a chorus of jeers and catcalls. According to one report, Lenin himself, appearing before a noisy gathering of Moscow metal workers, asked his listeners, who had accused the Bolsheviks of ruining the country, if they would prefer to see a return of the Whites. His question drew a bitter retort : "Let come who may-whites, blacks, or devils themselves-just you clear OUt."3

Unrest in the capital escalated swiftly, as factory meetings were succeeded by strikes and demonstrations. Workers took to the streets with banners and placards demanding "free trade," higher rations, and the abolition of grain requisitions. Nor did they stop at economic demands. Some of the demonstrators appealed for the restoration of political rights and civil liberties, and here and there a placard even called for the revival of the Constituent Assembly, while others bore the uglier legend "Down with the Communists and Jews."4 At first, the authorities tried to end the demonstrations with promises of relief, but these were unavailing and regular troops and officer cadets ( kursanty ) had to be called in to restore order.

No sooner had the Moscow disturbances begun to subside than a far more serious wave of strikes swept the former capital of Petrograd. An air of tragedy hung over the city, "a ghost of its former self," in the description of a contemporary, "its ranks thinned by revolution and counter-revolution, its immediate future uncertain."5 Situated in the northwestern corner of Russia, remote from the main centers

3 New Y ark Times, March 6, 1 92 1 .

4 "Sobytiia v Petro grade," Maklakov Archives, Series A , Packet 5, No. 1 3 ; "Pis'mo iz Petrograda ot poloviny fevralia 1 92 1 goda,"

Miller Archives, File 5M, No. 5 ; Navyi Mir, March 1, 1 92 1 ; H. B.

Quarton, Viborg, to Secretary of State, March 3 , 1 92 1 , National

Archives, 8 6 1 .00/8245. According to Quarton, these demonstrations were not reported in the Soviet press to prevent their spread to other cities.

5 Angelica Balabanoff, My Life as a Rebel, New York, 1 9 3 8 , p.

26 1 .

36


of food and fuel supply, Petrograd suffered even more than

Moscow from hunger and cold. Avail able stores of food had

shrunk to only a fifth of what they had been before the First

World War. 6 Townsmen went for m iles on foot into the

neighboring forests, without warm clothing or decent shoes,

to chop wood to heat their homes. In early February more

than 60 of the largest Petrograd factories were forced to close

their gates for lack of fuel . 7 Me anwhile, food supplies had

all but vanished. According to a Menshevik witness, Fyodor

Dan, starving workers and soldiers begged in the streets for

a crust of bread. S Angry citizelis protested against the un

equal system of rations which favored some categories of the

popul ation over others . Tensions were aggravated by reports

that p arty members had received new shoes and clothing.

Rumors of this kind, always rife in times of stress and hard

ship, were widely believed and figured prominently in the

turmoil preceding the revolt at Kronstadt.

As in Moscow, street demon strations were heralded by

a rash of protest meetings in Petrograd's numerous but de

pleted factorie s and shops. Economic grievances led the list,

above all the question of food . Speaker after speaker called

for an end to grain requisitioning, the removal of roadblocks,

the abolition of privileged rations, and permis sion to b arter

personal possessions for food. On February 23 a clamorous

meeting took place at the Trubochny factory, still one of

Petrograd's largest n;etal producers, although its working

force had dwindled to a fraction of what it had been three

or four years earlier. Before the gathering dispersed, a reso

lution was passed dem anding an incre ase in food rations and

the imm ediate distribution of all shoes and winter cloth ing

on hand. The men returned the next morning but soon laid

6 Pukhov, Kranshtadtskii miatezh , p. 1 9 . 7 Pravda, February 1 2 , 1 92 1 . 8 F. I. Dan, D va gada skitanii ( 1 9 1 9 - 1 92 1 ) , Berlin, 1 922, pp. 1 04-

1 05 .

3 7


down their tools and walked out of the factory. Making their way to Vasili Island on the northern side of the Neva, they tried to organize a mass demonstration to dramatize their grievances. A delegation was sent to the barracks of the Finland Regiment but failed to draw the soldiers into the demonstration. Nevertheless, additional workers from nearby factories and students from the Mining Institute began to arrive, and before long a crowd of 2,000 had collected to shout their disapproval of the government. According to one account, the Bolshevik chairman of the Petrograd Council of Trade Unions, N. M. Antselovich, rushed to the scene and urged the workers to return to their jobs but was dragged from his car and beaten.9 Before the situation could get completely out of hand, Zinoviev, party chairman in Petrograd and chairman of the Soviet, dispatched a company of armed military cadets with orders to break up the demonstration. After some buffeting and shouting, and a few shots fired into the air, the strikers were dispersed without bloodshed. 10

. The demonstration on Vasili Island was only a foretaste of what was to come. The following day, February 25, the Trubochny workers again took to the streets, fanning out through the surrounding factory districts and calling their fellow workmen off the job. Their efforts were immediately

successful. Walkouts took place at the Laferme tobacco fac

tory, the Skorokhod shoe factory, and the Baltic and Pa

tronny metal plants; then, fanned by rumors that some of

the Vasili Island demonstrators had been killed or wounded

the previous day by the military cadets, the strike spread

to other large enterprises, including the Admiralty shipyards

and the Galernaya drydocks. In several places crowds

9 "Sobytiia v Petrograde," Maklakov Archives, Series A, Packet

5, No. 1 3 ; Novaia R usskaia Zhizn', March 8, 1 92 1 . 1 0 Pravda 0 Krons/ztadte, Prague, 1 92 1 , p . 6 ; Pukhov, Kronshtadskii

miatezh, pp. 29-3 0; Kornatovskii, ed., Kronshtadtskii miatezh, p. 1 30 ;

Berkman, The Bolshevik Myth, pp. 29 1 -92.

38


gathered to hear impromptu attacks on the policies of the government, and once again the kursanty were summoned to disperse them.

Alerted by the strikes in Moscow, the Petrograd authorities, under Zinoviev's supervision, had been keeping a watchful eye for signs of trouble in their own bailiwick. When it came, they acted swiftly to restore order. On February 24, the very day of the Vasili Island demonstration, the Petro grad Committee of the Communist party met and organized a three-man Defense Committee, consisting of M. N. Lashevich, a member of the Revolutionary War Council of the Soviet Republic, D. N. Avrov, commander of the Petrograd Military District, and N. M. Antselovich of the Trade Union Council. Vested with emergency powers, the Petrograd Defense com-mittee ordered every district of the city to set up its own "revolutionary troika" to prevent the disturbances from spreading. Modeled after the Defense Committee itself, the revtroiki were composed of the district party organizer, the local military commander, and either the chairman of the district soviet or the commissar of the local military school. That same day the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, chaired by Zinoviev, proclaimed martial law through-out the city. An 11 P. M . curfew was imposed, and gatherings

in the streets were forbidden at any time. 1 1

While the Trubochny strikers made the rounds of the

factories, exhorting the workmen to join them in a mass pro

test against the authorities, Zinoviev and his colleagues

sought ways to avert a bloodbath. On February 25 the Petro

grad Soviet, the Trade Union Council, and the party committee addressed a joint appeal "To the Workers of Red

11 Petrogradskaia Pravda, February 25 and 26, 1 92 1 ; lzvestiia Petrogradskogo Soveta, February 26, 1 92 1 . Antselovich appears to

have served on the Petrograd Defense Committee only during the

first few days of its existence. Thereafter all orders and decrees of the

committee were signed by Zinoviev, Lashevich, and Avrov.

39


Petrograd," urging them to stay on the job. The appeal admitted that the workers were suffering many hardships but explained that this was the cost of defending the revolution against its enemies. Even now, it said, the White Guards, aided by the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, were seeking to exploit the food crisis for their own malevolent purposes. Had the workers of "Red Peter" already forgotten the Yudeniches and Kolchaks, the Denikins and Wrangels? What could a White restoration give the people? Only "the landlord's whip and the tsarist crown." And what would result from quitting the factories? Even greater hunger and cold. The workers had indeed made enormous sacrifices, but all the more reason not to abandon the revolution at the very moment when victory had been achieved.12

With this appeal the Petrograd Bolsheviks launched a major propaganda campaign to stem the unrest within the city. From every official quarter the strikers were warned not to play into the hands of the counterrevolution. Hunger, exhaustion, and cold, ran the government's argument, were the inevitable consequences of the "Seven Years' War" through which the country had just passed. Did it make any sense to forfeit such a costly victory to the "White Guard swine" and their supporters? The sole beneficiaries of the strikes and demonstrations, declared the Petrograd Soviet, were the Polish landlords in Riga and the English capitalists in London, who might be tempted to demand greater concessions at the negotiating table. In the same vein, a proclamation by the kursanty of Petrograd denounced the Trubochny workers for actions which could please only "the English, French, and other landlords, the White Guard agents who are scattered everywhere, and their servants, the lackeys of capitalism-the SR's and Mensheviks."1 3 The Petrograd

12 Krasnaia Gazeta, February 25, 192 1 . 13 lzvestiia Petrogradskogo Soveta, February 25, 1 92 1 ; Pctrograd

skaia Pravda, February 26, 1 92 1 .

40


Defense Committee warned that British, French, and Polish spies had been smuggled into the city to take advantage of the confusion. Meanwhile, the daily press printed a spate of resolutions from various Petrograd factories and trade unions condemning the "provocateurs" and "idlers" responsible for the disturbances . 14 The favorite epithet for the alleged troublemakers was shkurniki or "self-seekers"-literally, persons concerned only for their own skins. And instead of the usual words for "strike" (stachka or zabastov ka) , the term volynka was employed, a colloquialism embracing not only regular walkouts but sitdown strikers and slowdowns as well. According to Fyodor Dan, the authorities preferred this pejorative rather than admit that genuine strikes could be launched against a "workers' government."15

On February 26, as the disturbances mounted, the Petrograd Soviet held a special session to consider further action. An ominous note was sounded when N. N. Kuzmin, a commissar of the Baltic Fleet who was to acquire a certain notoriety in the weeks ahead, called attention to the rising temper of the sailors and warned that an explosion might occur if the strikes were allowed to continue. Pursuing this line, Lashevich, a member of the Petro grad Defense Committee, declared that stern measures were the only way to deal with the strikers. He demanded in particular that the Trubochny workers, the chief instigators of the movement, be locked out of their factory and thus automatically deprived of their rations. The Soviet concurred and immediately issued the necessary orders. The Laferme factory, a second hotbed of proletarian discontent, was also shut down, and workers from other enterprises were directed to return to their machines or suffer the same punishment. 16

14 See, for example, Komatovskii, ed. , Kronshtadtskii miatezh, pp. 1 3 8, 144.

15 Dan, D va goda skitanii, p. 1 05.

16 Pravda 0 Kronshtadte, p. 6; Berkman, The Kronstadt Rebellion,

p. 7.

41


This thinly veiled attempt to starve the strikers into sub

mission merely added to the existing tensions. During the

remaining days of February the movement continued to

spread, forcing factory after factory to suspend operations.

On the 28th the contagion reached the giant Putilov metal

works with its 6,000 workers, a formidable body though only

a sixth of what it had been during the First World War.

By now the fourth anniversary of the February Revolu

tion was approaching, and the disquiet in Petrograd, as Dan

noted, recalled the mood of the city in 1917, just before

the collapse of the autocracy.1 7 Another factor provoking

official concern was a change in the character of the workers'

demands. Initially, the resolutions passed at factory meetings

dealt overwhelmingly with familiar economic issues: regular

distribution of rations, issuance of shoes and warm clothing,

removal of roadblocks, permission to make foraging trips

into the countryside and to trade freely with the villagers,

elimination of privileged rations for special categories of

workingmen, and so on. On the last two days of February

these economic demands acquired a more urgent tone; one

leaflet, for example, cited cases of workers who had been

found frozen or starved to death in their homes. 18 But even

more alarming, from the standpoint of the authorities, was

the fact that political grievances had begun to occupy a

prominent place in the strike movement. Among other things,

the workers wanted the special squads of armed Bolsheviks,

who carried out a purely police function, withdrawn from

the factories, as well as the disbandment of the labor armies,

some of which had recently been posted to the larger Petro

grad enterprises. On a more fundamental level, pleas for the

restoration of political and civil rights, which at first had

been sporadic, became insistent and widespread.

At such a moment, it is hardly surprising that the political

17 Dan, Dva gada skitanii, p. 107.

18 Berkman, The Bolshevik Myth, p. 292.

42


opposition should be stirred into action. The Menshevik and

SR organizations in Petrograd, though decimated by arrests

and hounded- by the police, managed to distribute a number

of proclamations among the working-class population. On

the 27th, for example, the following manifesto appeared in

the streets of the city:

A fundamental change is necessary in the policies of

the government. First of all, the workers and peasants

need freedom. They do not want to live by the decrees of

the Bolsheviks. They want to control their own destinies. Comrades, support the revolutionary order. In an or

ganized and a determined manner demand:

Liberation of all arrested socialists and nonparty work

ingmen; abolition of martial law; freedom of speech, press,

and assembly for all who labor; free elections of factory

committees, trade unions, and soviets.

Call meetings, pass resolutions, send delegates to the

authorities, bring about the realization of your demands. 19

Although the manifesto was unsigned, it bore earmarks of

the agitation which, by their own admission, Dan and his

fellow Menshevik leaders were actively conducting at the

end of February. Aided by sympathetic printers, among

whom the Mensheviks had always enjoyed a large following,

the Petrograd organization was able to issue many leaflets

and proclamations calling for freely elected soviets and labor

unions, the restoration of civil liberties, an end to the terror,

and the liberation of socialists and other left-wing political

prisoners from Communist jails. In the economic sphere, the

Mensheviks appealed to the government to end grain requi

sitioning and the compulsory establishment of state farms, and

to restore freedom of trade between town and country, with

regulations to prevent speculation.

These were demands which the Mensheviks had been

19 Komatovskii, ed., Kronshtadtskii miatezh, p_ 26.

43


making since the early stages of the Civil War, and which

Fyodor Dan and David DaHin had so vigorously advanced at

the Eighth Congress of Soviets in December 1920. What the

Mensheviks wanted, in essence, was the fulfillment of the

existing constitution, so that all socialist parties might have

a place in the Soviet system and the working people could

enjoy the freedoms arbitrarily denied them by the Bolshevik

dictatorship. In keeping with their role as a legal opposition,

a role which they had performed since 1917, the Mensheviks

shrank from any appeal for the overthrow of the government

by force of arms. Rather, as the above manifesto indicates,

they called on the workers of Petro grad to hold meetings,

pass resolutions, and petition the authorities-in short, to

apply "in an organized and a determined manner" every

legal pressure for political and economic reform. Nonetheless,

their criticisms aroused the concern and indignation of the

government, for they amounted to nothing less than the

accusation that the Bolsheviks had betrayed the fundamental

principles of the revolution. Besides, who could guarantee

that the workers, once stirred into action, would stop at legal

methods of protest and not erupt into an open rebellion?

Unlike the Mensheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries had

long pinned their hopes on a mass uprising to oust Lenin's

regime from power. In its place they aimed to restore the

popularly elected Constituent Assembly, in which their party

had won a majority of the seats but which the Bolsheviks had

dispersed in January 19 1 8. In 1921 these twin objectives

the overthrow of Bolshevik power and the revival of the

Constituent Assembly-remained at the heart of their pro

gram, and the following proclamation, pasted on the walls

of Petrograd on February 2 8, over the signature of the "So

cialist Workers of the Neva District," was probably of SR

origin:

We know who is afraid of the Constituent Assembly.

It is they who will no longer be able to rob the people,

44


but will have to answer before the people's representatives

for their deceit, their robberies, and all their crimes.

Down with the hated Communists! Down with the Soviet

government! Long live the Popular Constituent Assem

bly!20

This leaflet ( and others like it) was much more militant and

uncompromising than anything the Mensheviks were capable

of turning out. Actually, in tone and content it was closer to

the propaganda of such underground organizations as the

Union for the Resurrection of Russia, an alliance of liberals

and right-wing socialists who shared an overriding desire to

bring an end to Bolshevik rule.

The flood of anti-Communist propaganda let loose during

the February strikes raises the question of leadership of the

movement. Was it the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolution

aries, as the government charged, who had brought the

workers into the streets? There can be no question that both

groups did their best to encourage the strikes once they had

broken out. This was particularly true of the Mensheviks,

who by 1921 had regained much of the working-class sup

port that they had lost during the 1917 Revolution. At the

time of the Petro grad disturbances, Menshevik influence in

the Trubochny factory and other troublesome enterprises was

considerable.21 Menshevik agitators received a sympathetic

hearing at workers' meetings, and their leaflets and mani

festos passed through many eager hands. Yet, for all this

activity, which undoubtedly played a role in fanning the

disturbances, there is no evidence that the Mensheviks or any

other group had planned and organized them in advance.

The workingmen of Petrograd, as we have seen, had ample

20 Ibid. The text of this leaflet and that of the Mensheviks quoted above are also to be found in Pravda 0 Kronshtadte, pp. 6-7 ; Berkman, The Krondstadt R ebellion, pp. 7-8 ; and Slepkov, Kronshtadtskii

miatezh, p. 1 8 .

21 See P. 1. Boldin, "Men'sheviki v Kronshtadtskom miatezhe," Krasnaia Letopis', 1931, No. 3, pp. 13-14.

45

i


causes of their own for erupting into open protest against

the government. In the sense that they were unplanned

though hardly unmotivated-the February strikes were a

spontaneous expression of popular discontent.

After a week of turmoil, the Petro grad authorities finally

succeeded in bringing the situation under control. No mean

feat, this was achieved through a combination of force and

concessions which Zinoviev and his associates applied with

determined efficiency. Complicating their task was the fact

that a good part of the regular garrison, having themselves

been caught up in the general ferment, could not be relied

upon to carry out the government's orders. Units considered

untrustworthy were disarmed and confined to their barracks.

It was even rumored that the issue of boots was prohibited

so as to prevent the soldiers from leaving their quarters and

mingling with the crowds, as they had done with such fateful

results four years earlier.22 In place of the regular troops,

the authorities relied on the kursanty, the Communist officer

cadets, who were called in by the hundreds from neighboring

military academies to patrol the city. In addition, all party

members in the area were mobilized in case they too should

be needed to restore order .

Overnight Petrograd became an armed camp. In every

quarter pedestrians were stopped and their documents

checked. Theaters and restaurants were closed and the cur

few strictly enforced. From time to time an isolated shot rang

out in the streets. As tensions rose, there occurred, particu

larly among the industrial workers, a flareup of anti-Semitic

feeling, which the Petro grad Soviet attributed to the J ew

baiting literature circulated by White agitators.23 To a certain

extent, perhaps, this charge was justified, although anti

Semitism was a traditional response of Russian peasants and

workers during times of unusual hardship. In any case, the

Jewish inhabitants of Petrograd were apprehensive, and some

22 Dan, Dva goda skitanii, p. 1 07. 23Izvestiia Petrogradskogo Soveta, March 1, 1921.

46


of them left the city, fearing a pogrom if the government

should collapse and the mobs be allowed free rein in the

streets.24

Beyond concentrating heavy military force within the city,

the Bolsheviks tried to break the protest movement by lock

ing more strikers out of their factories. This entailed-as in

the case of Trubochny and Laferme-denying the workers

their rations. At the same time, widespread arrests were

carried out by the Petrograd Cheka. Speakers who criticized

the regime at factory meetings and street demonstrations were

taken into custody. During the last days of February, by

Dan's reckoning, some 500 recalcitrant workmen and union

officials ended up behind bars.25 Students, intellectuals, and

other nonworkers who were also caught in the dragnet proba-

bly numbered in the thousands, many of them belonging to

opposition parties and groups. The Menshevik organization in

Petro grad was particularly hard hit by Cheka raids. Virtually

every active leader who had thus far escaped arrest was

carted ofI to prison. Kazukov and Kamensky were arrested

towards the end of February, after organizing a workers'

demonstration. A few, including Rozhkov and Dan, remained

at large a day or two longer, feverishly turning out and dis

tributing their proclamations and leaflets, until they too were

rounded up by the police. All told, during the first three

months of 192 1 , it has been estimated that some 5 ,000 Men

sheviks were arrested in Russia, including the party's entire

Central Committee.26 At the same time, the few prominent

SR's and anarchists who still found themselves at liberty

were also rounded up. According to Victor Serge, in his

24 Novaia Russkaia Zhizn', March 8, 1 92 1 ; Quartan to Secretary of State, March 5, 192 1 , National Archives, 8 6 1 .00/8253. On the resurgence of anti-Semitism, see also Pukhov, Krollshtadtskii miatezh, p. 32; and Emma Goldman, Living My Life, New York, 1 9 34, pp. 875-76.

25 Dan, Dva gada skitanii, p. 1 08 .

26 Leonard Schapiro, The Origin o f the Communist Autocracy, Cambridge, Mass., 1 956, p. 205.

47


Memoirs of a Revolutionary, the Cheka wanted to shoot its

Menshevik prisoners as the principal in�tigators of the strikes,

but Maxim Gorky intervened and saved them.27

Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks stepped up their propaganda

drive in a last effort to persuade the strikers to return to

work without bloodshed. To supplement the press, party

members-particularly those who enjoyed popular esteem

were recruited for agitation in the streets, factories, and bar

racks. Their reception, by and large, was not very cordial,

although Mikhail Kalinin, president of the All-Russian Con

gress of Soviets, seems to have been more successful than

most of his colleagues ( possibly because of his own plebeian

origins ) in gaining a hearing in the workshops and military

installations around the city. As their central theme, the

agitators blamed the strikes and demonstrations on counter

revolutionary plots hatched by the White Guards and their

Menshevik and SR allies. This formula, as Emma Goldman

noted, had grown stale from three years of repetition,28 yet

it still had some effect, especially since the Mensheviks and

SR's made no attempt to conceal their active role in the

disturbances.

But it was not by force and propaganda alone that order

was restored in Petrograd. Of equal importance was a series

of concessions of sufficient magnitude to take the edge off

the opposition movement. As an immediate step, extra ra

tions were distributed to the soldiers and factory workers,

amounting to a tin of preserved meat and a pound and a

quarter of bread per day, which, the American consul in

Viborg reported, "made quite a hole in Petrograd's dwin

dling food supply."29 At the same time, emergency supplies

27 Victor Serge, Memoirs 0/ a Revolutionary, 1901-1941, London, 1 963, p. 1 3 0. Gorky himself left the country soon afterwards.

28 Goldman, Living My Life, p. 875.

29 Quarton to Secretary of State, March 4, 1 92 1, National Archives, 86 1 .00/824 1 .

48


were rushed in from other locations to be used when exist

ing stores were exhausted.

Beyond this, Zinoviev, on February 27, announced a

number of additional concessions to the workers' most press

ing demands. Henceforward they would be permitted to

leave the city in order to forage for food. To facilitate this,

Zinoviev even promised to schedule extra passenger trains

into the surrounding countryside. Moreover, the roadblock

detachments around Petro grad were instructed not to con

fiscate food from ordinary workingmen but to confine them

selves to guarding against genuine speculation. Zinoviev also

announced that the government had purchased some 1 8 mil

lion poods of coal from abroad, which would arrive shortly

and help ease the fuel shortage in Petro grad and other cities.

But most important, he revealed for the first time that plans

were afoot to abandon the forcible seizure of grain from the

peasants in favor of a tax in kind.30 In other words, the

system of War Communism was at long last to be replaced

by a new economic policy, a policy which would at least

partially restore freedom of trade between town and country.

On March 1, as if to confirm this intention, the Petrograd

Soviet announced the withdrawal of all roadblocks from

the whole of Petro grad province. That same day, moreover,

the Red Army soldiers who had been assigned to labor duties

in Petrograd-some two or three thousand in all-were

demobilized and allowed to return to their native villages.

According to the official explanation, curtailments of pro

duction had made their further presence unnecessary. 31

As a result, after several days of tense excitement, the

Petro grad disturbances rapidly petered out. By March 2 or 3

30 Krasnaia Gazeta, February 27, 1 9 2 1 . The decision to buy the coal (1 8.5 million poods-a pood is 36 pounds) had already been made by the Council of Labor and Defense on February 1 : see Lenin,

Poinoe sobranie sochinenii, LII, 63 . 31 Izvestiia Petrogradskogo Soveta, March 1 , 192 1 ; Krasnaia

Gazeta, March 1 , 192 1 .

49


nearly every striking factory was back in operation. The

concessions had done their work, for more than anything

else it was cold and hunger which had stimulated popular

disaffection. Yet there is no denying that the application of

military force and the widespread arrests, not to speak of

the tireless propaganda waged by the authorities, had been

indispensable in restoring order. Particularly impressive in

this regard was the discipline shown by the local party or

ganization. Setting aside their internal disputes, the Petro

grad Bolsheviks swiftly closed ranks and proceeded to carry

out the unpleasant task of repression with efficiency and

dispatch. This applies as much to Zinoviev, the local party

chieftain, as to any of his subordinates. For all his reputation

as a craven, liable to panic when danger threatened, Zinoviev

appears to have acted with remarkable presence of mind to

quell the disorders in his midst.

Then, too, the collapse of the movement would not have

come so soon but for the utter demoralization of Petro grad's

inhabitants. The workers were simply too exhausted to keep

up any sustained political activity. Hunger and cold had re

duced many to a state of listlessness bordering on total

apathy. What is more, they lacked effective leadership and

a coherent program of action. In the past these had been

supplied by the radical intelligentsia. But in 1921, as Emma

Goldman noted, Petro grad's intellectuals were themselves in

no condition to lend the workers any meaningful support,

let alone active guidance. Once the torchbearers of revolu

tionary protest, they now felt too weary and terrorized, too

paralyzed by the futility of individual effort, to raise their

voices in opposition. With most of their comrades in prison

or exile, and some already executed, few of the survivors

were willing to risk the same fate, especially when the odds

against them were so overwhelming and when the slightest

protest might deprive their families of their rations.32 For

82 Goldman, Living My Life, p. 885.

50


many intellectuals and workers, moreover, the Bolsheviks,

with all their faults, were still the most effective barrier to

a White resurgence and the downfall of the revolution.

For these reasons, the strikes in Petrograd were fated to

lead a brief existence. Indeed, they ended almost as suddenly

as they had begun, never having reached the point of armed

revolt against the regime. Nevertheless, their consequences

were enormous. By arousing the sailors of neighboring Kron

stadt, who were closely attuned to insurrectionary develop

ments in the old capital, they set the scene for what was in

many ways the most serious rebellion in Soviet history.

KRONST ADT is a fortified city and naval base on Kotlin

Island, situated in the Gulf of Finland about 20 miles west

of Petrograd. Constructed by Peter the Great at the begin

ning of the eighteenth century, the original fortress was de

signed to protect the new Russian capital on the Neva

Peter's celebrated "window on the West"-from the open

sea. The island itself, however, has possessed strategic im

portance since the ninth century, when the mouth of the

Neva formed the starting point of the famous water route

"from the Varangians to the Greeks." Today, a visitor to

Peterhof, Peter's majestic palace on the mainland southeast

of Kotlin, can stand at the water's edge and see the vague

outline of the island off in the distance, guarding the sea

approaches to the former capital. A narrow piece of land,

some eight miles long by about a mile and a half wide at its

greatest breadth, its irregular contours form a rough elongated

triangle. Inaccessible to outsiders, its coasts are well de

fended by chains of forts and batteries on rocks projecting

far out into the sea to the north and south.

The eastern end of the island, which faces Petrograd, is

occupied by the city of Kronstadt. A thick ancient wall en

circles the town, the main point of entry being the Petro grad

Gate on the east. On the southern side lie the harbors and

51

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drydocks for vessels of the Baltic Fleet. The Gulf of Finland

is frozen for more than four months of the year, from late

November until the end of March or the beginning of April.

Before the First World War, during the summer months,

pleasure steamers plied regularly between Petersburg and

Kronstadt. In winter the standard route was by train to

Oranienbaum, a town and military base on the mainland

five miles due south of Kotlin Island, and from there by

sleigh over a snow road atop the thick ice of the gulf. By all

accounts, Kronstadt, in the early part of the twentieth cen

tury, was a very picturesque place. Its numerous canals,

tree-lined streets, and stately public buildings resembled

those of the nearby imperial capital. Among its principal

landmarks were the striking Cathedral of St. Andrew, with

its golden dome and ochre-colored walls, the old Arsenal

and Admiralty buildings, and the School of Naval Engineer

ing (renamed the House of Education in 1917). Dominating

the center of the city was the immense Anchor Square, with

its huge Seamen's Cathedral (Morskoi Sob or ), built at the

end of the nineteenth century. The square acquired its name

in the middle of the eighteenth century, when large ware

houses were erected there to store ships' anchors.33 Capable

of holding more than 25,000 people, it was subsequently

used for training recruits and for military reviews. During

1905 and 19 1 7 Anchor Square became Kronstadt's revolu

tionary forum, the daily meeting-place for throngs of en

thusiastic sailors, soldiers, and workingmen who practiced

a kind of rough-and-ready direct democracy which recalled

the Cossack popular assemblies of an earlier age.

In 192 1 Kronstadt served as the main base of the Baltic

33 Kronshtadt: kratkU plltevoditel', Leningrad, 1963, p. 77. Other

descriptions of Kronstadt are to be found in the En tsiklopedicheskii

slovar', St. Petersburg, 1895, XVIA, 823-24; Encyclopedia Britan nica,

11th edn., xv, 927-28; and Voline, La R e\'olwioll inCOf1nlle (1917-

1921), Paris, 1943, pp. 408-10. For Kronstadt's early history see A. V. Shelov, lstoricheskii ocherk kreposti Krollshtadt, Kronstadt, 1904.

53


Fleet. Its total population numbered some 50,000, about

half of whom were civilians and half military. The latter in

turn were divided between the crews of the fleet (who formed

the majority ) and the soldiers of the garrison, mostly artillery

men who manned the main bastion and the outlying forts

and gun emplacements. Many of the civilians were associated

with the fortress and naval station, either as military de

pendents or as workmen employed at the dockyards, ware

houses, and other shore establishments. The rest were mainly

factory hands, artisans, fishermen, small tradesmen, and

employees of cooperatives and government institutions within

the city proper.34

The name of Kotlin-kettle or cauldron-was a fitting one

for the island on which Kronstadt was situated, as its prin

cipal inhabitants, the Baltic sailors, were perpetually seething

with discontent. A restless and independent breed who

loathed all privilege and authority, they seemed forever on

the verge of exploding into open violence against their officers

or against the central government, which they regarded as

an alien and a coercive force. Temperamentally, they bore

a close resemblance to those audacious freebooters of a

former age, the Cossacks and strel'tsy (musketeers) of the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whose garrisons were

hotbeds of buntarstvo, or spontaneous rebellion. Like their

tempestuous forebears, the sailors were vol'nitsy, or untamed

spirits, who instinctively resisted external discipline and lusted

for freedom and adventure. When inflamed by rumor or

drink, they were as prone as their predecessors to run riot

and to vent their fury on the wealthy and powerful.

Kronstadt had a history of volatile radicalism reaching

back to the first great upheaval in twentieth-century Russia,

the Revolution of 1905. Illegal literature first appeared at

the naval base in 1901, and soon after this the sailors began

34 Pukhov, Kronshtadtskii miatezh , p. 49.

54


to form circles to discuss political and social questions and

to air their grievances-above all, low wages, bad food, and

the rigorous discipline to which they were continually sub

jected. The wave of strikes, jacqueries, and terrorism that

swept the country between 1902 and 1905 found a sympa

thetic chord among them and heightened their social and

political awareness. Insubordination towards officers and

other breaches of discipline became everyday occurrences.

By 1905, after the outbreak of war and revolution, whatever

semblance of morale still remained suffered a devastating

blow at the Straits of Tsushima, where a large part of the

fleet was wiped out by the Japanese. A further stimulus to

revolutionary activity, if any was needed, was provided by

the dramatic Potemkin mutiny of June 1905 in the Black

Sea Fleet.

The first serious trouble at Kronstadt began in October

1905, at the height of the revolution. It traced a pattern

which was to become increasingly familiar in the years

ahead. First came a mass meeting in Anchor Square. Thou

sands of disgruntled sailors and soldiers gathered to air their

discontents. Mingled with the familiar appeals for better

food and clothing, higher pay and shorter tours of duty, and

a relaxation of military discipline were cries for the immedi

ate overthrow of the autocracy and the inauguration of a

democratic republic with full civil liberties for all. In the

succeeding days tempers rose with appalling swiftness. On

October 25 a commotion occurred in the seamen's mess after

someone complained about the food. Shouts of "Kill the com

mandant" rose above the din of stamping feet and hammer

ing mess trays.35 The next day Kronstadt rose in open rebel

lion. Completely spontaneous in origin, the revolt quickly

degenerated into an orgy of plunder and destruction akin to

the strel'tsy mutinies during the reign of Peter the Great.

35 F. Kogan, Kronshtadt v 1905-1906 gg., Moscow, 1 926, pp. 7-13.

55


Crowds of sailors and soldiers rampaged through the city

streets, smashing shop windows and setting buildings aflame.

Barricades went up and several houses were occupied as

shelters against the expected arrival of punitive forces from

Petersburg. The rioting lasted for two days, leaving 17 dead

and 82 injured before government troops could restore order.

Nearly 3,000 mutineers were arrested. Many of them were

condemned to years of prison or exile, though no death

sentences were meted out. 36

On July 19, 1906, in the afterglow of the 1905 Revolution,

a second and more serious explosion occurred in Kronstadt,

sparked by a mutiny at its sister port of Sveaborg. Like its

predecessor of October, the new outbreak was a spontaneous

and disorganized affair which raged out of control for two

days before government reinforcements were able to crush

it. The rebel demands, while essentially the same as before,

took on a note of bitter disillusionment after the failures of

the preceding months. Hatred of authority and discipline re

mained the motive force behind the sailors' fury. "You have

drunk our blood long enough!" shouted one bluejacket to an

officer in the midst of the tumult, a cry which epitomized the

feelings of the insurgents.37 Both sides fought with unprec

edented ferocity, the rebels driven by frustration and out

rage, the authorities by the confidence of a swift victory

now that the revolutionary tide in Russia had begun to ebb.

An atmosphere of stem repressiveness having set in, this time

36 V. Voronevskii and N. Khenrikson, Kronshtadtskaia kreposfkliuch k Leningradu, Leningrad, 1 926, pp. 1 0- 1 6 ; Iu. Korablev,

Revoliutsionnye vosstaniia na Baltike v 1905-1906 gg., Leningrad, 1956, pp. 24-30; L. A. Lentsner, Kronshtadt v 1905-1906 gg., vos

pominaniia, Moscow, 1 956, pp. 1 56-65. For further material on the Kronstadt revolts of 1 905 and 1 906, see the documents collected in Voennye vosstaniia v Baltike v 1905-06 gg., Moscow, 1 933; and Voennye moriaki v period pervoi russkoi revoliutsii, 1905-1907 gg.,

Moscow, 1 955.

37 "Kronshtadtskoe vosstanie 1 906 g.," Krasnyi A rkhiv, 1 936, No. 4, p. 103.

56


36 ringleaders were executed and hundreds were imprisoned

or banished to Siberia.38

It is important to dwell on these early cases of spontaneous

rebellion in Kronstadt because, as we shall see presently, in

many ways they foreshadowed the stormy events of March

1921. This was especially true of the 1917 upheaval, when

once again Kronstadt was a center of unbridled revolutionary

activity. Under the influence of the extreme Left, which

throughout the year held ideological sway over Kotlin Is

land's tempestuous population, Kronstadt set itself up as a

revolutionary commune on the model of the Paris Commune

of 1 871, an event enshrined in the history and legend of

social rebellion. In May 1917 the maverick Kronstadt So

viet, led by Bolsheviks, anarchists, left-wing SR's and unaf

filiated radicals of an anarcho-populist bent, refused to bow

to the authority of the Provisional Government and pro

claimed itself "the sole power in the city."39 Thereafter the

Soviet exercised overall political authority, supported by the

general meetings in Anchor Square, which were held nearly

every day. Anchor Square, in the description of Efim Yar

chuk, an outspoken anarchist in the Kronstadt Soviet, became

a "free university" where revolutionary orators of every stripe

held forth to vast crowds of eager sailors, soldiers, and work

ingmen. A local Bolshevik leader, Ivan Flerovsky, proudly

dubbed the square "Kronstadt's veche," a reference to the

rowdy popular assemblies which flourished in the towns of

Russia during the middle ages.40

38 Korablev, Revoliutsiollflye vosstaniia na Baltike, pp. 89- 1 03 ; Lentsner, Kronshtadt v 1905-1906 gg., pp. 1 0 1 -24. According to Lentsner, 70 mutineers received the death sentence (perhaps some were reprieved ) .

39 R. P. Browder and A. F. Kerensky, eds., The R ussian Provisional

Government, 1917, 3 vols. , Stanford, 1 9 6 1 , III, 1296-99.

40 E. Iarchuk, Kronshtadt v russkoi revoliutsii, New York, 1 923, p . 54; 1. P. Fleravskii, Bol'shevistskii Kronslztadt v 1917 godu (po

lichnym vospominaniiam), Leningrad, 1 9 57, p. 1 7 .

57


Together, the Soviet and the forum in Anchor Square sat

isfied the political needs of Kronstadt's inhabitants. There

seems to have been no widespread desire for a· national

parliament or for any other central ruling body. For the most

part, the social and economic life of the city was administered

by the citizens themselves, through the medium of local

committees of every sort-house committees, ship commit

tees, food committees, factory and shop committees-which

throve in the prevailing libertarian atmosphere. A popular

militia was organized to defend the island from any outside

encroachments upon its sovereignty. Kronstadt's residents dis

played a real talent for spontaneous self-organization. Apart

from their various. committees, men and women working in

the same shop or living in the same neighborhood formed

tiny agricultural communes, each with about 50 members,

which undertook to cultivate whatever arable land could be

found on the empty stretches of the island. During the Civil

War, says Yarchuk, these collective vegetable gardens

helped save the city from starvation. 41

Cherishing their local autonomy, the Kronstadt population

warmly endorsed the appeal for "All power to the soviets"

put forward in 1917 by Lenin and his party. They interpreted

the slogan in a literal sense, to mean that each locality

would run its own affairs, with little or no interference from

any central authority. This, says Yarchuk, they understood

to be the true essence of "socialism."42 They regarded their

own revolutionary commune as a model of decentralized self

rule and confidently expected the rest of the country to

follow suit. "For all their revolutionary virtues," noted Ivan

Flerovsky, "the Kronstadt sailors had one serious weakness:

they naively believed that the force of their own enthusiasm

would suffice to establish the power of the soviets through-

41 Iarchuk, Krollshtadt v russkoi revoliutsii, pp. 22-23 .

42 I bid. , pp. 3 7 , 50.

58


out all of Russia. "43 Such hopes, however, were not to be

realized, and in the ensuing years of Bolshevik dictatorship

the libertarian commune of 1917 took on the aspect of a lost

revolutionary utopia. The revolt of 1921 was at bottom an

effort by the Kronstadters to recapture this golden age of

spontaneity, and "All power to the local soviets" was their

slogan.

Throughout the 1917 Revolution, the Baltic Fleet re

mained in a state of turbulence, punctuated by violent out

bursts against every form of political and military authority.

As in 1905, the sailors vented their greatest fury on their

officers, whom they saw as living symbols of outworn privi

lege and arbitrary power. The Kronstadters were particularly

eager to rid themselves of the severe discipline and the

atmosphere of penal servitude which had earned Kotlin

Island the reputation of a "sailors' Sakhalin."44 Thus, when

the February Revolution erupted, they seized the opportunity

to remove the shackles of regimentation and to settle accounts

with their unpopular superiors. On February 28 an angry

mob of bluejackets dragged the base commander, Admiral

R. N. Viren, from his quarters and carried him to Anchor

Square, where he was summarily executed. This act signaled

an orgy of bloodletting in which more than 40 Kronstadt navy

and army officers were killed. Some 200 others were arrested

and put behind bars . During the February turmoil a wave of

violence swept through the whole complex of Baltic Fleet

bases. A total of 76 naval officers, not to mention those of

the army garrisons, were done to death by their men. Besides

Viren, these included his counterpart at Sveaborg, Admiral

Butakov, and Admiral Nepenin, commander in chief of the

43 I. P. Flerovskii, "IiuI'skii politicheskii urok," Proletarskaia Re

voliutsiia, 1 926, No. 7, pp. 58-59.

44 F. F. RaskoI'nikov, Krollslzfadt i Pifer v 1917 godu, Moscow, 1 925, pp. 29-32.

59


entire Baltic Fleet, whose headquarters was then at Helsing

fors ( Helsinki ) . 45

This thirst for personal vengeance was only one aspect of

the revolutionary extremism which the February upheaval

let loose in Kronstadt. A spirit of libertarian abandon seized

hold of the place. Of course, the Bolsheviks, anarchists, SR

Maximalists, and other ultra-radical groups did what they

could to encourage it, and before long they came to exercise

a strong influence among the seamen and the rest of the Kron

stadt population. The principal target of these groups was not

the military officers but the Provisional Government itself.

And in the ensuing months they could count on the sailors to

support any revolutionary manifestation directed against the

new regime. The Kronstadters figured prominently in the

Petrograd street demonstrations of April 1917, and also of

June, when they came to the aid of a group of anarchists who

had barricaded themselves against an anticipated govern

ment attack. Again, during the stormy July Days, they rushed

to Petrograd at the first news of trouble and played a central

part in the abortive insurrection, for which Trotsky christened

them "the pride and glory of the revolution." ( In a well

known incident, a group of sailors seized Victor Chernov,

the SR Minister of Agriculture, and it was only Trotsky's

fast talking that saved him from being lynched. ) 46

At the end of August, during General Kornilov's march on

the capital, the sailors rallied to the defense of the revolution. The crew of the battleship Petropavlovsk, who had been in

the vanguard of the July uprising, called again for the im

mediate transfer of power to the soviets and demanded

45 Baltiiskie moriaki v podgotovke i provedenii Velikoi Oktiabr'skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii, Moscow, 1 957, pp. 1 9-22 ; V. V. Petrash, Moriaki Baltiiskogo flota v bor'be za pobedu Oktiabria, Leningrad, 1 966, p. 52.

46 N. N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, 1917, New York, 1 955, pp. 444-46. On the June and July events in Petrograd, see Alexander Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution, Bloomington, Ind. , 1 968.

60


Kornilov's arrest and execution. Four officers who protested

were themselves seized and put to death. 47 In the weeks that

followed, the sailors, true to their reputation of revolutionary

intransigence, continued to press for the overthrow of the

Provisional Government. On October 25 their moment ar

rived when Lenin launched his successful bid for power.

Taking to their boats, the sailors hurried to the capital to

lend their strength to the insurgents, joining the Petrograd

Red Guards in storming the Winter Palace, while the Pet

rograd cruiser Aurora fired blank rounds to demoralize the

defenders. For their role in October the men of Kronstadt

earned the accolade "the pride and glory of the revolution,"

with which Trotsky had honored them during the July Days.

Even after Kerensky's fall Kronstadt's revolutionary mil

itancy remained undin1inished. Victory, in fact, only whetted

the sailors' appetite for revenge against the social elements

which they had driven from power. Their propensity for

violent outbursts had particularly tragic results on the night

of January 6-7, 1918, when a band of Kronstadt hotheads

invaded a Petrograd hospital where two former Kadet min

isters of the Provisional Government, Shingarev and Kokosh

kin, were being held in custody, and murdered them in their

beds. On Lenin's instructions, 1. N. Steinberg, the Commissar

of Justice, began an inquiry, but Lenin reconsidered and de

cided to drop it rather than risk a confrontation with the sail

ors.48 Indeed, it was precisely because of their ruthlessness

that Lenin wanted the sailors on his side. He placed no small

value on their role as a kind of praetorian guard, ready at

a moment's notice to take up arms for the cause of the soviets.

In fact, on the night before the murders, he had sent a de

tachment of Kronstadters, led by a fierce young anarchist

47 Browder and Kerensky, The R ussian Provisional Government,

III, 1 5 8 1 -82. 48 I. N. Steinberg, A ls ieh Volkskommissar war, Munich 1 929, pp.

1 3 8-63 .

61


named Anatoli Zhelezniakov, to disperse the Constituent As

sembly, in which the Bolsheviks had failed to gain a major

ity.49 The sailors, of course, had their own reasons for oppos

ing the assembly. As we have seen, they had little use for any

central political institutions, particularly if dominated by

parties too conservative for their taste. In their eyes, direct

democracy through the local soviets was the political wave of

the future; a national parliament, by contrast, could only

be a step backward, a retreat towards the kind of "bourgeois"

society represented by the Provisional Government, which

they had been at such pains to liquidate.

Throughout the Civil War of 1918-1920, the sailors of

Kronstadt, and of the Baltic Fleet as a whole, remained the

torchbearers of revolutionary militancy. More than 40,000

bluejackets threw themselves into the struggle against the

Whites. 50 Noted for their courage and ferocity in combat, they

manned river flotillas and armored trains and replenished the

ranks of the Red Army on every front. At the critical battle

of Sviiazhsk-"the Valmy of the Russian Revolution"-they

provided Trotsky with his most ardent shock troops, helping

to turn back a large enemy force which threatened to pene

trate into the heartland of Bolshevik territory.

At the same time, however, serious friction was developing

between the sailors and the government. The first discordant

notes had sounded when Lenin, immediately after the October

coup, announced a cabinet composed exclusively of Bolshe

vik8. Wary of strong concentrations of authority, the Kron

stadt Soviet began to press for a coalition government in

which all socialist groups would enjoy representation-an

early foretaste of the Kronstadt program of March 1921.

Ominous murmurings arose among the sailors, cautioning

against the possibility of a new dictatorial regime. If the

49 See Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, Princeton, 1 967, p. 1 56. 50 P. G . Sofinov, Istoricheskii povorot (perekhod k novoi ekono

micheskoi politike), Moscow, 1 964, p. 45.

62


new Council of People's Commissars should dare betray the

democratic ideals of the revolution, it was said, then the guns

which took the Winter Palace could just as easily be turned

against the Smolny Institute, headquarters of the new admin

istration.51 Lenin apparently overlooked these hostile senti

ments when he threatened, in November 1917, to "go to the

sailors" after several of his colleagues demanded that other

socialists be admitted into the government. 52

By early 1918 complaints against the arbitrary and bureau

cratic character of Communist rule were no longer isolated

occurrences. In March the situation was aggravated when

the fleet's own elected central committee (Tsentrobalt) was

dissolved and its functions transferred to a council of com

missars appointed by the party. For a growing number of

sailors the revolution had been betrayed, a belief which the

Brest-Litovsk treaty of the same month did much to strength

en. Many sided with the Left Communists, anarchists, and

Left SR's, who opposed the treaty as a surrender to German

imperialism and a retreat from the goal of world revolution.

In April the crews of several Baltic vessels passed a strongly

worded resolution accusing the government of planning to

liquidate the fleet in compliance with German demands. The

resolution went so far as to call for a general uprising to

dislodge the Bolsheviks and install a new regime that would

adhere more faithfully to the principles of the revolution.

Nothing came of this, but a number of sailors joined the Left

SR revolt in Moscow in July 1918, raided the headquarters

of the Cheka, and briefly arrested a high-ranking official, M.

I. Latsis.53

Further trouble occurred in October, when a mass meeting

at the Petro grad naval base adopted a resolution in favor of

51 Voline, La Revolution incollnue, p. 200.

52 See Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist A utocracy, p. 74.

53 L. D. Trotskii, Kak vooruzhalas' revoliutsiia, 3 vols. in 5, Moscow, 1 923- 1 925, I, 1 40, 278.

63


tearing up the Brest-Litovsk agreement and resisting the

German forces which had occupied the Ukraine, an area from

which many of the sailors were recruited. 54 At the same

time, the sailors went on record against the Bolshevik mo

nopoly of political power. Condemning the suppression of the

anarchists and opposition socialists, they called for free elec

tions to the soviets in order to achieve a broader representa

tion of the various left-wing parties. Finally, they denounced

the compulsory seizure of grain, which the government had

recently inaugurated, branding the food detachments as

"thieves" and "plunderers of the peasants."55

The mutiny of October 19 1 8 never got off the ground ;

troops were called in and the sailors quickly brought to order.

But their demands strikingly anticipated the Kronstadt pro

gram of 192 1, down to the slogans of "free soviets" and

"Away with the commissarocracy. " The two events, indeed,

form part of a long historical pattern. A glance at the behavior

of the Baltic Fleet from 1905 to 192 1 reveals many elements

of continuity, attesting to what Pavel Dybenko, a Bolshevik

military leader who himself had been a Kronstadt seaman,

called the "eternally rebellious spirit" of the sailors. 56 Over

the years, one finds the same loathing of privilege and au

thority, the same hatred of regimentation, the same dream

of local autonomy and self-administration. One finds, more

over, a powerful antagonism towards the central government

and its appointed officials, an antagonism that was deeply

rooted in the anarchist and populist traditions of the lower

classes, dating from the rise of a powerful bureaucratic state

during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Isolated

from the mainland, Kronstadt, even more than its sister

54 G. S. PukhoY, Kak vooruzhalsia Petrograd, Moscow, 1 93 3 , p. 36.

5" I. Flerovskii, "Miatezh mobilizovannykh matrosov Y Peterburge 1 4 oktiabria 1 9 1 8 g. ," Proletarskaia Revoliutsiia, 1 926, No. 8 , pp. 2 1 8-37.

56 P. E. Dybenko, lz nedr tsarskogo {lota k velikomu Oktiabriu, Moscow, 1 928, p. 69.

64


bases on the Baltic, became a stronghold of primitive anar

chic rebellion. The Kronstadt sailors, renowned for their rev

olutionary fervor and independent spirit, had little tolerance

for arbitrariness or compulsion from any source. Spontaneity

and decentralization were their watchwords. They yearned

for a free social order anchored in the local soviets, a direct

popular democracy patterned after the Cossack krug and

medieval veche. They were forever prone to sudden par

oxysms of violence against the holders of authority, the

officers, the bureaucrats, the men of property or privilege. In

March 1921 all of these urges were to find their final and

most formidable expression.

Meanwhile, as the Civil War expanded, the grievances of

the sailors accumulated. Discontent, as in the past, centered

on the question of military discipline. The Revolution of

1917 had left the army and navy in a state of total disor

ganization. The traditional hierarchy of command had fallen

apart, leaving a vacuum of authority which was filled by in

numerable committees of soldiers and sailors who elected

their own leaders and passed upon orders received from

above. The resulting chaos closely paralleled the situation in

industry, where local factory committees were establishing

"workers' control" in enterprise after enterprise. In the first

months after the October Revolution, Bolshevik policy tended

to foster this spontaneous process of decentralization. By

government decree, traditional military ranks and titles were

abolished, and a "socialist" fighting force was proclaimed

into existence, "built up from below on the principle of

election of officers and mutual comradely discipline and

respect."57 In practice, this led to the final collapse of cen

tral authority and of the normal chain of command, and

encouraged the age-old tendency of Russian service men to

run amok and indulge in marauding and plunder.

The outbreak of Civil War in 1918, however, brought

57 Wollenberg, The R ed A rmy, p. 4 1 .

65


about a quick reversal in Bolshevik military policy. The

regime's very survival demanded an end to the chaotic de

centralization of authority and the restoration of discipline

in the ranks. As Commissar of War, Trotsky was the chief

opponent of the "partisan spirit" (partizanshchina) which

had infected the armed services. Following traditional mili

tary procedures, he soon whipped a new and effective fighting

force into shape. The old ranks were not restored, but thou

sands of former imperial officers were returned to service

as "military specialists" ( voenspetsy ) under the watchful

supervision of political commissars. In this way, badly needed

command experience and technical knowledge were provided

until a new corps of Red Commanders could be trained.

Within the Red Army the committee system was eliminated,

obedience of orders strictly enforced, and the holiday from

discipline brought to a swift and sudden conclusion. 58

It was not long before the government began to extend

these measures to the navy. But here stiffer opposition was

encountered. As Dybenko noted, Bolshevik efforts to liquidate

the ship committees and to impose the authority of centrally

appointed commissars aroused a storm of protest in the Baltic

Fleet.59 For the sailors, whose aversion to external authority

was proverbial, any attempt to restore discipline meant a

betrayal of the freedoms for which they had struggled in 19 17.

Not only were they reminded of the harsh regimentation of

tsarist times, but they felt that military efficiency would be

better served by allowing free rein to their own initiative.

They were determined not to have the fruits of victory denied

them by the very party which they had helped lift into power.

As a result, there was continuous friction between the rank

and file and their Bolshevik commissars and commanders,

and skirmishes occasionally broke out with the Cheka units

58 See John Erickson, The Soviet High Command, London, 1 962 , pp. 25-52.

59 Dybenko, lz nedr tsarskogo fiOla, p. 199.

66


which fought alongside the regular troops at the height of

the Civil War.

When the Civil War ended, the situation, instead of im

proving, took a tum for the worse. Overnight the stringent

policies of the government lost their raison d'etre. Just as the

peasants saw no further need for the confiscation of their

produce and the suppression of the free market, and just as

the workers chafed at the sUbjugation of their trade unions

and at the restoration of factory discipline, one-man m anage

ment, and "bourgeois" technical specialists, so the sailors

and soldiers demanded the return to democratic principles in

military life. In the turbulent Baltic Fleet opposition to the

reinforcement of discipline, the abolition of ship committees,

and the appointment of commissars and "military specialists"

to command positions quickly assumed threatening dimen

sions. Furthermc,re, several new factors came to bear which

nurtured the mutinous spirit among the ships' crews as well

as the troops of the Baltic garrisons. In the first place, since

the White danger had been removed, the men were able to

obtain leave for the first time in many months, and, returning

to their native villages, were confronted at first hand with

the policy of grain requisitions and the violent methods by

which it was carried out. Some were themselves stopped by

roadblock detachments and searched for illegal food. In the

towns they saw the full extent of human misery which the

war had brought about. Everywhere they were exposed to a

restless and discontented population. They listened to the

complaints of their fathers and brothers, which in so many

ways resembled their own grievances against the authorities.

"For years," remarked Stepan Petrichenko, a leading figure in

the Kronstadt rising, "the happenings at home while we were

at the front or at sea were concealed by the Bolshevik censor

ship. When we returned home our parents asked us why we

fought for the oppressors . That set us thinking."60 It is easy

60 New York Times, March 3 1 , 1 92 1 .

67


to imagine the extent to which accounts of men like Petri

chenko fanned the unrest of their comrades when they re

turned to their posts. So drastic, in fact, was the effect on

morale that the government took steps to curtail furloughs

in the fleet. In December 1920 this touched off angry pro

tests aboard the Sevastopol, one of the two dreadnoughts

in Kronstadt harbor which were to play a central role in the

events of the coming February and March. During the winter

of 1920- 192 1 the rate of desertions among the Baltic sailors

mounted steadily. By early 1 92 1 the fleet was falling apart as

an organized military force.61

Another danger which loomed large during this period

was the impact of the food and fuel crises on the fleet.

The sailors suffered only slightly less than the general civilian

population from hunger and cold. With the onset of winter,

the lack of heat in the barracks and aboard ship made life

difficult to bear. Nor was there any stock of boots or warm

uniforms on hand to mitigate the effects of the unusually

severe cold that gripped the Baltic area between November

and April. Worse still was the decline in both the quantity and

the quality of the food rations which the men were issued. 62

A traditional complaint within the Russian navy, bad food

had more than once given rise to disturbances in the past.

And now, towards the end of 1 920, an epidemic of scurvy

broke out in the Baltic Fleet. In December, according to

emigre sources in Helsingfors, the sailors of Kronstadt sent

a delegation to Moscow to appeal for an improvement in ra

tions, but when they arrived they were locked up by the

authorities. Interceding for his men, F. F. Raskolnikov, the

commander of the fleet, warned that unless the delegates were

released at once Kronstadt might turn its guns on Petrograd.

His prophetic words, however, went unheeded.63

61 PukhoY, Kranshtadtskii miatezh, pp. 44-54. 62 Ibid., p. 42 ; PukhoY, "Kronshtadt i Baltiiskii flot pered miatezhem

1 92 1 goda," Krasnaia Letapis', 1 930, No. 6, pp. 1 50-53. 63 Obshchee Dela, January 2, 1 92 1 .

68


Even those sailors who belonged to the Communist party

were not immune from the rising temper of opposition with

in the fleet. Sharing the independent spirit of their comrades,

they had never been readily amenable to party or military

discipline. By the end of 1920 a "fleet opposition" had taken

shape, the counterpart of the "military opposition" in the

Red Army and the "workers' opposition" in the factories,

each of which stood for local initiative and party democracy

and against regimentation and rigid central control. The

"fleet opposition" advocated a Soviet navy organized on

"socialist" lines, as distinguished from what they regarded

as the outmoded hierarchical and authoritarian concepts of

the past. Defending the elective ship committees, they scorned

the introduction of "military specialists" as well as the "dic

tatorial behavior" (diktatorstvo) of certain B olshevik officials

in the political administration of the fleet. 64

Even more alarming, a growing number of Bolshevik

sailors, for whom the "fleet opposition" was an inadequate

outlet for their disaffection, took the bolder step of tearing

up their party cards. In January 1921 alone some 5,000

Baltic seamen quit the Communist party. Between August

1920 and March 192 1 , the Kronstadt party organization lost

half of its 4,000 members. 65 Bolshevik officials blamed the

exodus on unreliable elements which had inundated the

party's ranks during the Civil War when qualifications for

membership had been relaxed or lifted entirely, as in the

"party week" recruitment drive of August 1919 . I t was large

ly these newcomers, according to party sources, who made

up the recent wave of defectors. As a precautionary measure,

moreover, hundreds more who did not leave of their own

accord were purged from the rolls, and some of these were

64 Lazarevich, "Kronshtadtskoe vosstanie," Bor'ha, 1 92 1 , Nos. 1 -2, p . 3 .

65 Ida Mett, La Commune de Croll stadt: Crepuscule sanglant des

Soviets, Paris, 1 949, p. 26; Komatovskii, ed. , Krollsh tadtskii miatezlz,

pp. 1 3 - 1 5 .

69


transferred to the Black Sea and Caspian fleets or to posts

in the Far East. 66

The authority of the party was further undermined by a

struggle for political control in the fleet, which pitted Trotsky,

the War Commissar, against Zinoviev, the party chief in

Petro grad. Zinoviev had resented Trotsky ever since October

1 9 1 7, when the latter replaced him as Lenin's closest as

sociate. During the final months of 1 920, according to

Fyodor Raskolnikov, the fleet's commander, and E. I. Batis,

the head of its political directorate (Pubalt ) -both of whom

were loyal to Trotsky-Zinoviev tried to discredit his rival

by casting him in the role of a "dictator" while projecting

himself as a champion of party democracy and local initia

tive. In November 1 920, at Zinoviev's urging, the Petrograd

party committee demanded that the political administration

of the BaJtic Fleet be transferred from Pubalt into its own

hands, a demand which Trotsky's supporters stubbornly re

sisted.61

As a result of this dispute, the commissars and other

party administrators lost much of their hold over the rank

and file. This was already evident in early December, when

a large group of sailors walked out of a general meeting at

the Petrograd naval base in protest against the manner of

choosing delegates to the Eighth Congress of Soviets ( the

election, it appears, had been dominated by party officials

from the local political department of the fleet ) . As winter set in tempers continued to rise until a stormy climax was

reached at the Second Conference of Baltic Fleet Commu

nists, held in �etrograd on February 1 5 . The "fleet opposi

tion," having emerged as a potent force, won an overwhelm

ing majority in favor of its resolution calling for the

immediate decentralization of political control. This was to be

C6 Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik, March 1 8, 1 92 1 , p. 1 .

6; Pukhov, "Kronshtadt i Baltiiskii fiat," Krasnaia Letopis', 1 930, No. 6, pp. 1 74-94. Cf. Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist

A utocracy, p. 299.

70


accomplished by transferring the seat of authority from

Pubalt and its political departments to the local party com

mittees, along the lines proposed by Zinoviev and his asso

ciates the previous November. The resolution criticized

Pubalt for its lack of contact with the masses and its aloofness

from the party activists on the grass-roots level. Pubalt, in the

words of the resolution, had become a "bureaucratic organ

without widespread authority" among the rank and file ;

to restore local initiative, the whole political structure of the

fleet had to be refashioned "on the lines of democratism."

Some of the delegates also called for the outright abolition

of the political departments of the fleet, a demand shortly

to be echoed by the Kronstadt rebels. And one party official

warned that unless reforms were inaugurated, "in two or

three months we shall have a rising." 68

By THE middle of February 1921, therefore, tensions in the

Baltic· Fleet had clearly reached the bursting point. Before

the month was out the strike wave broke in Petro grad. Al

most immediately, news of the disturbances reached Kron

stadt, where a tradition of revolutionary solidarity with the

working class of "Red Peter" had existed since 1905 and

1 917. Mingled with the initial reports was an assortment of

bogus rumors which quickly roused the passions of the

sailors. It was said, for example, that government troops

had fired on the Vasili Island demonstrators and that strike

leaders were being shot in the cellars of the Cheka. 69 In the

prevailing atmosphere of unrest such stories spread like wild

fire, filling the local commissars with alarm and leading

Kuzmin to warn the Petro grad Soviet that an explosion would

occur unless the strikes were crushed swiftly. But Kuzmin's

warning came too late. That very day, February 26, the

68 PukhoY, Kronshtadtskii miatezh , pp. 50-5 2 ; G. P . Maximoff, Th e Guillotine at Work, Chicago, 1 940, p. 1 69 .

69 Dan, Dva goda skitanii, p. 1 0 8 ; Goldman , Lil'ing My Life, p. 876.

71


crews of the Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol held an emer

gency meeting and decided to send a delegation to Petrograd

to find out what was happening. Both battleships, now frozen

side by side in the ice of Kronstadt harbor, had long been

hotbeds of rebellious sentiment and activity. During the July

Days of 1917, as we have seen, the Petropavlovsk had set an

example of militant opposition to the Provisional Govern

ment; and the following month four of its officers had been

shot on dubious charges of supporting General Kornilov. It

is without exaggeration, therefore, that Pavel Dybenko, him

self a former member of the crew, speaks in his memoirs of

"the eternally stormy Petropavlovsk."70 The Sevastopol too

had had a history of intemperate behavior, its crew only re

cently having rioted over the curtailment of furloughs in the

fleet.

When the Kronstadt delegation arrived in Petro grad, it

found the factories surrounded by troops and military cadets.

In the shops still in operation, armed Communist squads

kept a watchful eye on the workmen, who remained silent

when the sailors approached. "One might have thought,"

noted Petrichenko, a leading figure in the impending revolt,

"that these were not factories but the forced labor prisons of

tsarist times. "71 On February 28 the emissaries, filled with

indignation at the scenes they had witnessed, returned to

Kronstadt and presented their findings at an historic meeting

on board the Petropavlovsk.

Their report, of course, expressed full sympathy for the

strikers' demands, and called for greater self-determination

in the factories as in the fleet. The meeting then voted for

a long resolution which was destined to become the political

charter of the Kronstadt rebellion:

70 Dybenko, Iz nedr tsarskogo !iota, p. 1 59 . 7 1 S . M. Petrichenko, Pravda 0 Kronshtadtskikh sobytiiakh, n.p.,

1 92 1 , p . 6; Petrichenko, "0 prichinakh Kronshtadtskogo vosstaniia," Znamia Bor'by, Nos. 1 4- 1 5 , December 1 925-January 1 926, pp. 6-7.

72


Having heard the report of the representatiyes sent by

the general meeting of ships' crews to Petrograd to in

vestigate the situation there, we resolve :

1. In view of the fact that the present soviets do not

express the will of the workers and peasants, immediately

to hold new elections by secret b allot, with freedom to

carry on agitation beforehand for all workers and peasants ;

2. To give freedom of speech and press to workers and

peasants, to anarchists and left socialist parties;

3 . To secure freedom of assembly for trade unions and

peasant organizations ;

4. T o call a nonparty conference o f the workers, Red

Army soldiers, and sailors of Petrograd, Kronstadt, and

Petrograd province, no later than March 10 , 192 1 ;

5. To liberate all political prisoners of socialist parties,

as well as all workers, peasants, soldiers, and sailors im

prisoned in connection with the labor and peasant move

ment s ;

6. T o elect a commission to review the cases o f those

being held in prisons and concentration camps;

7. To abolish all political departments because no

party should be given special privileges in the propagation

of its ideas or receive the financial support of the state

for such purposes. Instead, there should be established

cultural and educational commissions, locally elected and

financed by the state ;

8. To remove immediately all roadblock detachments;

9. To equalize the rations of all working people, with

the exception of those employed in trades detrimental to

health ;

1 0. To abolish the Communist fighting detachments in all

branches of the army, as well as the Communist guards

kept on duty in factories and mills. Should such guards

or detachments be found necessary, they are to be ap-

73


pointed in the army from the ranks and in the factories

and mills at the discretion of the workers;

1 1 . To give the peasants full freedom of action in re

gard to the land, and also the right to keep cattle, on con

dition that the peasants manage with their own means,

that is, without employing hired labor;

12. To request all branches of the army, as well as our

comrades the military cadets ( kursanty ) , to endorse our

resolution;

1 3 . To demand that the press give all our resolutions

wide publicity;

1 4. To appoint an itinerant bureau of control;

1 5 . To permit free handicrafts production by one's

own labor.

PE T RICHENKO, Chairman of the Squadron Meeting

PERE PELKIN, Secretary72

The Petropavlovsk resolution echoed the discontents not

only of the Baltic Fleet but of the mass of Russians in towns

and villages throughout the country. Themselves of plebeian

stock, the sailors wanted relief for their peasant and worker

kinfolk. Indeed, of the resolution's 1 5 points, only one-the

abolition of the political departments in the fleet-applied

specifically to their own situation. The remainder of the doc

ument was a broadside aimed at the policies of War Commu

nism, the justification for which, in the eyes of the sailors and

of the population at large, had long since vanished. The fact

that some of the resolution's sponsors, including Petrichenko,

had recently gone home on leave and witnessed the plight

of the villagers with their own eyes doubtless influenced their

demands on the peasantry's behalf. This was especially true of

Point 1 1 , which would have allowed the peasants to make

free use of their land so long as they did not employ hired

72 Pravda 0 Kronshtadte, pp. 46-47 ; Berkman, The Kronstadt Rebellion, pp. 9- 1 1 .

74


help. What this implied was nothing less than the abolition

of food requisitions, and possibly the liquidation of the state

farms as well. By the same token, the sailors' inspection tour

of Petrograd's factories may account for their inclusion of

the workingmen's chief demands-the abolition of road

blocks, of privileged rations, and of armed factory squads

in their program.

But it was not these economic demands which so alarmed

the Bolshevik authorities when word of the Petropav!ovsk

meeting reached them. Some of the demands, indeed, such as

the removal of the roadblock detachments ( Point 8), were

about to be granted by Zinoviev and his subordinates in

Petrograd. Moreover, at that very moment the government

was in the midst of drafting a new economic policy that would

go considerably further than the sailors' program in satisfy

ing popular wishes. It was the political demands, rather,

aimed as they were at the very heart of the Bolshevik dictator

ship, which prompted the authorities to call for immediate

suppression of the Kronstadt movement. True, the sailors

did not appeal for the overthrow of the Soviet government ;

nor did they advocate a restoration of the Constituent As

sembly or of political rights for the gentry and middle

classes. They despised the moderate and conservative ele

ments of Russian society as much as ever and had no thought

of granting them a new lease on life. But the resolution's

opening declaration-that "the present soviets do not express

the will of the workers and peasants"-represented a clear

challenge to the Bolshevik monopoly of political power. The

call for new elections to the soviets, linked as it was to a

demand for free expression for all workers, peasants, and

left-wing political groups, was something that Lenin and

his followers were not prepared to tolerate. In effect, the

Petropavlovsk resolution was an appeal to the Soviet gov

ernment to live up to its own constitution, a bold statement

of those very rights and freedoms which Lenin himself had

75


professed in 19 17. In spirit, it was a throwback to October,

evoking the old Leninist watchword of "All power to the

soviets ." But the Bolsheviks saw it in a different · light : by

rejecting their claims to sole guardianship of the revolution,

to exclusive representation of the workers and peasants, it

was nothing but a manifesto of counterrevolution and had to

be dealt with accordingly.

With the adoption of the Petropavlovsk resolution the pace

of events quickened. The following day, March 1 , a mass

meeting of sailors, soldiers, and workingmen was held in

Anchor Square. Some 15,000 attended, more than a quarter

of Kronstadt's combined military and civilian population.

Several eyewitness accounts have come down to us, both from

Communist and non-Communist sources,73 and together they

provide a vivid and detailed picture of what took place. At

the speakers' platform stood two high-ranking Bolshevik

officials, M. I. Kalinin and N. N. Kuzmin, who had been sent

from Petro grad to save the situation. According to some

reports, Zinoviev had accompanied his colleagues as far as

Oranienbaum but decided not to proceed any further for fear

of rough handling by the sailors. 74 Kalinin, president of the

Soviet Republic, was a former factory worker born of a

peasant family in Tver province, and ordinary Russians, it

seems, felt a certain affection for him. During the previous

week he had been one of the few Bolshevik speakers in

Petrograd to gain a sympathetic hearing from the strikers.

73 V. Kuznetsov, lz vospominanii politrabotnika, Moscow, 1 930, pp. 67-6 8 ; Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia, 1 92 1 , No. 7, p. 20; G . A. Cheremshanskii, "Kronshtadtskoe vosstanie, 2 8 fevralia- 1 8 marta 1 92 1 ," manuscript, Columbia Russian Archive. See also Pukhov, Kronshtadtskii miatezh, p. 6 1 ; and Kornatovskii, ed. , Krollshtadtskii miatezh, pp. 7 1 -72 .

74 "Prichiny, povody, techenie i otsenka Kronshtadtskikh sobytii," manuscript, Hoover Library; Quarton to Secretary of State, April 23, 1 92 t , National Archives, 86 1 .00/ 86 1 9 ; Novaia Russkaia Zhizn', March 6, 1 92 1 .

76


Perhaps, then, it was thought that his popularity might now

be helpful in bringing the sailors to their senses.

When Kalinin arrived, he was met by music, banners, and

a military guard of honor, a hopeful sign that serious trouble

might still be averted. Moreover, the Anchor Square meeting

opened in a friendly spirit, with the Bolshe\ik chairman of '

the Kronstadt Soviet, P. D. Vasiliev, himself presiding. But

tempers be_gan to flare when the report of the delegates sent

to investigate the Petro grad disturbances was read. When the

Petropavlovsk resolution was put before the assembly, ex

citement reached a high pitch. Kalinin rose and began to

speak against it but was repeatedly interrupted by hecklers :

"Stow it, Kalinych, you m anage to keep warm enough."

"Look at all the jobs you've got. I'll bet they bring you

plenty." "We know ourselves what we need. As for you, old

man, go back to your woman." Kalinin struggled to make

himself heard, but his words were drowned out by whistles

and catcalls.

Kuzmin, a ranking commissar attached to the Revolu

tionary War Council of the fleet, was given the same treat

ment. In an effort to win the crowd's attention, he reminded

them of their heroic role in the Revolution and Civil War.

Suddenly a voice broke in : "Have you forgotten how you

had every tenth man shot on the Northern Front? Away with

him!" The meaning of this is unclear, but perhaps during the

Civil War Kuzmin had served as a commissar at the Northern

Front ( the Archangel and Murmansk area) and had been in

volved in the shooting of Bolshevik troops after some mutiny

or other breach of discipline. ( Such incidents were not un

common. A notorious case occurred when a group of Petro

grad recruits seized a steamer on the Volga and fled towards

Nizhni Novgorod ; on Trotsky'S orders, an improvised gun

boat intercepted the deserters, and a field tribunal condemned

the commander, the commissar, and every tenth m an in the

77


ranks to death. ) 75 Whatever the explanation, Kuzmin de

livered a menacing reply : "The working people have always

shot traitors to the cause, and they will continue to shoot

them in the future. In my place you would have shot every

fifth man, not every tenth." "Enough of that," someone

shouted. "You can't threaten us. Kick him out! " For several

minutes the jeers and heckling forced Kuzmin to remain

silent. Then, in a final attempt to speak, he denounced the

Petropavlovsk resolution as a counterrevolutionary docu

ment, shouting that indiscipline and treason would be

smashed by the iron hand of the proletariat-whereupon he

was driven from the platform to a loud chorus of booing.76

Once Kalinin and Kuzmin had stepped down, the rostrum

became the property of the sailors and soldiers. One after

another they lashed out at the authorities for the lack of food

and fuel, the confiscation of grain, the roadblocks, and above

all for the fact that there was still no relief in sight months

after the Civil War had ended. While ordinary citizens suf

fered, they declared, the commissars were warm and well

fed. Among the principal orators was Petrichenko, a senior

clerk from the Petropavlovsk and a leader of the revolt from

its very inception. Echoing a traditional folk myth, formerly

aimed at the boyars and officials of old Muscovy, he accused

the Bolsheviks of "hiding the truth from the people." Popu

lar legends of this type, as we shall see in a moment, were

deeply embedded in the psychology of the rebellion and oc

cupied a central place in its rather primitive ideology.

Petrichenko urged the crowd to endorse the Petropavlovsk

resolution (which bears his signature ) and to demand free

elections to the soviets throughout the country.

The resolution was then put to a vote and approved by an

overwhelming majority, over the protests of Kalinin, Kuz-

75 See Erickson, The Soviet High Command, p. 3 9.

76 Berkman, The Bolshevik Myth, p. 294; Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, p. 1 27 .

78


min, and Vasiliev. Next, it was decided to summon a special

conference to arrange for new elections to the Kronstadt

Soviet, whose term, it appears, was in any case due to expire

that very day. Finally, the meeting voted to send a 30-man

delegation to Petrograd to acquaint the people with its de

mands and to request that they send nonparty representa

tives to Kronstadt in order to observe the situation at first

hand. The delegates, duly dispatched, were arrested on ar

rival and never heard of again. 7 7

When the gathering dispersed, Kalinin and Kuzmin went

to local party headquarters to consider their next move.

Kalinin, says Emma Goldman, the well-known anarchist who

was following events from the Astoria Hotel in Petrograd,

then departed from Kronstadt in a spirit of continued friend

ship.78 In view of what had just taken place, this seems

hard to believe. According to Soviet sources, .Kalinin was

detained for a time at the Petrograd Gate before being al

lowed to leave the island ; and we have it from the insurgents

themselves, interviewed afterwards in Finland, that many of

the sailors wanted to throw him in jail but were dissuaded

by arguments that this would violate the principle of freedom

enunciated in their own resolution. 79 In any event the point

is not crucial. What seems reasonably clear is that, with the

passage of the sailors' resolution at Anchor Square, events

turned sharply in the direction of outright mutiny.

For this development Victor Serge places the blame

squarely on the shoulders of Kalinin and Kuzmin, whose

brutal attitude and bungling speeches, he says, could not but

provoke the sailors into a fury. Far from calming the angry

Kronstadters, writes Serge in his memoirs, the two officials

77 Pravda 0 Kronshtadte, p. 10 .

78 Goldman, Living My Life, p. 877. 79 Pukhov, Kronshtadtskii miatezh, p. 62 ; "Interv'iu s chlenami Vre

mennogo Revoliutsionnogo Komiteta (s matrosami 'Petropavlovska' Iakovenko, Karpenko i Arkhipovym ) ," manuscript, Hoover Library.

79


treated them as rogues and traitors and threatened them with

merciless reprisals unless they came to their senses. so This,

certainly, is an exaggeration, for the unfolding rebellion had

far deeper causes than mere provocative speeches. The

sailors, moreover, seemed predisposed to bait the Com

munists, scarcely allowing them to utter a sentence before

interrupting with shouts and catcalls. On the other hand, it

cannot be denied that Kalinin and Kuzmin might have shown

greater discretion before such an excitable audience. There

can be little doubt that their tactless words reinforced the

sailors' hostile feelings towards Bolshevik officialdom.

Meanwhile, the authorities were greatly alarmed by the

failure of the Kronstadt Communists to oppose the decisions

of the Anchor Square meeting. Though present in substan

tial numbers, the party rank and file seem to have been swept

along by the rebellious tide, and when Kalinin and Kuzmin

raised their voices in protest not one of their fellow Bolshe

viks ( other than Vasiliev ) came forward to support them .

Indeed, the majority evidently voted for the Petropavlovsk

resolution, while the rest abstained. It was this feature, as

Leonard Schapiro notes, which distinguished the Kronstadt

rising from all previous outbursts against the Soviet govern

ment.Sl

The next day, March 2, the incipient revolt advanced a

further step when a conference (summoned by the meeting

in Anchor Square ) was held to arrange for the reelection of

the Kronstadt Soviet. Some 300 delegates attended, two

from each ship, military unit, factory, trade union, and the

like, hastily elected the same morning or the night before.

The Communists, it appears, were not permitted to dominate

these electoral meetings and to choose their own delegates

80 Serge, Memoirs oj a R ero/utiollary, p. 1 27 . 8 1 Schapiro, The Origin o j the Comm unist A utocracy, p. 303 . Cf.

George Katkov, "The Kronstadt Rising," St. A n tony's Papers, No. 6, London, 1 9 59, p. 28.

80


as in the past. When addressing their comrades, they were

heckled and interrupted in the same way Kalinin and Kuz

min had been the day before. In the main garrison, for in

stance, the Bolshevik commissar barely had time to object

to the irregular proceedings before being cut off by the "mili

tary specialist" in charge of artillery, a former tsarist general

named Kozlovsky, who will figure very largely in our story.

"Your time is past," Kozlovsky declared. "Now I shall do

what has to be done." It is likely that scenes such as this

were repeated in other units that morning. Nonetheless, al

though most of the elected delegates were nonparty, the

Communists managed to win a very substantial minority,

amounting perhaps to as much as a third of the total num

ber. 82

The conference assembled in the large auditorium of the

House of Education, the former School of Marine Engineer

ing and one of the most prominent buildings in the city.

Armed sailors from the battleship Petropavlovsk were posted

outside and in the halls to prevent any interference with the

meeting. Their presence may also have been designed to

intimidate any would-be defenders of the existing order. Not

unexpectedly, it was their shipmate Petrichenko who chaired

the conference. From the very. outset, as we have seen, he

had assumed a leading role in the Kronstadt movement, a

role which he retained until the bitter end more than two

weeks later. Born of a peasant family in the Ukraine, Stepan

Maksimovich Petrichenko was well endowed with the quali

ties of a rebel leader. He was an intense young sailor of

about thirty, handsome and solidly built, with a strong,

magnetic character that won him a devoted following. De

spite his Ukrainian accent, he spoke effectively in a simple

and direct language which reflected his peasant upbringing.

8 2 Pukhov, Kronsh tadtskii miatezh , p. 63. For details of the March 2 conference, see Pravda 0 Kronshtadte, pp. 1 1 5- 1 7 ; and R evoliutsion

naia R ossiia, 1 92 1 , No. 7, pp. 2 1 -22.

81


He was an experienced seaman, having joined the navy in

1912, nearly a decade before the tragic events in which he

now became embroiled. Before that, he had worked as a

plumber in his native district. From all accounts, he was

possessed of a keen intellect which belied the mere two years

of formal schooling he had received as a child. His energy

and resourcefulness, moreover, are widely affirmed by those

with whom he came into contact. 83

With Petrichenko in the chair, the conference opened by

electing a five-man presidium. The delegates then listened

to a few speeches before turning to their principal business

of organizing new elections to the Soviet. The first to mount

the rostrum were the Communist officials Kuzmin and Vasi

liev, who had opposed the Petropavlovsk resolution the day

before in Anchor Square. Now, to the consternation of their

listeners, they pursued the same critical tack. Kuzmin's speech

in particular aroused the indignation of the delegates. Re

minding them that a formal peace with Poland had not yet

been concluded, he warned that any division in governmental

authority-any dvoevlastie, or dual power-might at this

point tempt Marshal Pilsudski to revive hostilities. The eyes

of the West, he said, were fixed on Soviet Russia, watching

for signs of internal weakness. As for the disturbances in

Petro grad, Kuzmin went on, Kronstadt was grossly misin

formed both as to their gravity and extent. There had indeed

been a momentary Hareup, but it had passed very quickly,

and now the city was quiet. At one point, Kuzmin, alluding

to the unrest within the Baltic Fleet, defended the conduct

of commissars like himself, whom the sailors, at their recent

meetings, had held up as objects of scorn. This could hardly

have pleased his listeners. But what incensed them more

83 See Volia Rossii, March 1 5, 1 92 1 ; Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia, 1 92 1 , No. 8, pp. 6-7 ; New York Times, March 3 1 , 1 92 1 ; and the

interview with Petrichenko by Edmond Stratton, March 1 9, 1 92 1 , National Archives, 86 1 .00/8470.

82


than anything else were Kuzmin's concluding remarks, which

carried the same implicit threat as his speech of the previous

day. "You have me at your mercy," he told them. "You can

even shoot me if it suits your fancy. But should you dare to

raise your hand against the government, the Bolsheviks will

fight with their last ounce of strength."84

The defiant tone of Kuzmin's address left his audience

completely alienated. Given the explosive atmosphere in the

hall, a more tactful approach was surely in order. Yet his

remarks were by no means lacking in point. Since it was a

fact that no treaty had yet been signed with Poland ( an armi

stice had been in effect since October and peace talks were

being conducted at Riga ) , the threat of renewed Polish in

tervention, backed once more by French officers, was not

to be lightly dismissed. Petrograd remained in a particularly

exposed position, and Soviet officials genuinely feared that

any evidence of internal difficulties might strengthen the

Polish position at the bargaining table or even lead to an

outright resumption of the war. It was true, moreover, that

the Petrograd strikes were on the wane, having reached a

peak on the last day of February. But the rumors of shootings

and full-scale rioting had already aroused the sailors, and

on March 2, at a time when the disturbances had all but

ceased, they were drafting the erroneous announcement ( for

publication the following day ) that the city was in the throes

of a "general insurrection."85 This misapprehension, by em

boldening the Kronstadters with visions of a mass upheaval

on the mainland, plunged them into serious acts which more

than a few would later have cause to regret.

When Kuzmin stepped down, Vasiliev, chairman of the

defunct Soviet, addressed the assembly in a similar vein. By

the time he had finished, the general attitude of the meeting

had become plainly anti-Bolshevik, notwithstanding the large

number of Communists among the delegates. The hostility

84 Pravda 0 Kronshtadte, p. 116. 85 Ibid., p. 47.

83


of the sailors, as Alexander Berkman noted, was not directed

against the party as such, but against its bureaucrats and

commissars, whose arrogance, as they saw it, was exemplified

by the speeches of Kuzmin and Vasiliev. Kuzmin's speech,

said Berkman, was "a firebrand thrown into gunpowder."86

So infuriated were the delegates that the hapless officials, to

gether with the commissar of the Kronstadt Battleship Squad

ron ( a Bolshevik named Korshunov, whose jurisdiction in

cluded the Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol) , were placed under

arrest and removed from the hall. This was a flagrant act

of insubordination, far more serious than the brief detention

of Kalinin the day before. It marked a giant step down the

road towards open mutiny. On the other hand, the delegates

rejected a motion to arrest the other Communists present

and to deprive them of their arms. Although a vocal minor

ity expressed strong anti-Communist feelings, most of their

comrades were determined to adhere to the principles of the

Petropav[ovsk resolution, the charter of their budding move

ment, which guaranteed a voice for all left-wing political

groups, Bolsheviks included.

Serious as it was, the arrest of the three officials did not

represent an irreversible step. This, however, was not long

in coming. After the guards ushered their prisoners from the

auditorium, Petrichenko recalled the meeting to order. The

Petropavlovsk resolution, in what by now seemed a firmly

established ritual, was read aloud and once again enthusi

astically approved. The conference then turned to the main

item on its agenda, the election of a new Soviet. But sud

denly they were interrupted by a voice from the floor. It be

longed to a seaman from the Sevastopol, who shouted that

1 5 truckloads of Communists armed with rifles and machine

guns were on their way to break up the meeting. The news

had the effect of a bombshell, throwing the delegates into

86 Berkman, The Kronstadt Rebellion, pp. 1 2- 1 3 .

84


alarm and confusion, and only after a period of great com

motion was sufficient calm restored for the meeting to re

sume. Someone proposed sending a new delegation to Petro

grad to seek an alliance with the strikers, but this was re

jected for fear of more arrests. Then, unsettled by the pros

pect of a Bolshevik attack, the conference took a fateful

step. It decided to establish a Provisional Revolutionary

Committee, charged with administering the city and garrison

pending the formation of a new Soviet. For lack of time to

hold proper elections, the conference's five-men presidium

was designated as the Provisional Revolutionary Committee,

with Petrichenko as its chairman. By this action the Kron

stadt movement placed itself outside the pale of mere pro

test. The rebellion had begun.87

Once again, therefore, rumor had played a critical role

in shaping the course of events in Kronstadt. The speeches

of Kuzmin and Vasiliev, by arousing the indignation of the

delegates, had set the stage for the impetuous acts which

followed. But it was the bogus report that Communists were

preparing to attack the meeting that actually precipitated

the formation of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee,

the step by which the sailors crossed the Rubicon of insur

rection. Who was responsible for launching the rumor? Ac

cording to Petrichenko, it was the work of the Communists

themselves, with the object of breaking up the conference. 88

Although certainly possible, there is no evidence that this

was the case . It is just as likely that the sailor who shouted

the news wanted to stir things up against the Communists.

And it is worth noting that Petrichenko himself took up the

rumor and announced that a detachment of 2,000 Commu-

87 Pravda 0 Kronshtadte, p. 46. Cf. Robert V. Daniels, 'The Kronstadt Revolt of 1 92 1 : A Study in the Dynamics of Revolution," A merican Slavic and East European R eview X ( December 1 95 1 ) , 244 ; and John G . Wright, The Truth A bout Kronstadt, New York,

1 9 3 8 . 88 Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia, 1 92 1 , No. 8, p . 8 .

85


nists were indeed on their way to disperse the meeting. Once

again pandemonium broke loose, and the delegates left the

hall in great excitement. 89

What may have inspired the rumor was the fact that a

group of Communist trainees, headed by a member of the

Kronstadt Cheka, were observed leaving the Higher Party

School while the conference at the House of Education was

in progress. Far from intending to attack the meeting, how

ever, they were actually fleeing Kronstadt for Krasnaya

Gorka, a fort located on the mainland to the southwest. An

other incident, on the previous day, may also have con

tributed to the insurgents' fears. Following the Anchor Square

meeting, a number of Bolshevik loyalists did in fact consider

taking military action to head off the rebellion. Novikov, the

commissar of the Kronstadt fortress, even obtained light

artillery and machine guns from the arsenal. But when it be

came apparent that they lacked sufficient support for such

an undertaking, Novikov's group decided to quit the island.

Novikov himself was intercepted at Fort Totleben, near the

Karelian coast, but managed to escape on horseback across

the ice. 90 The insurgents, at all events, did not remain idle. The

newly created Provisional Revolutionary Committee took up

headquarters on board the flagship Petropavlovsk, where two

days before all the ferment had originated. Acting with great

dispatch, the committee sent armed detachments to occupy

the arsenals, telephone exchange, food depots, water-pumping

station, power plants, Cheka headquarters, and other strategic

points. By midnight the city had been secured without any

resistance. Moreover, all the warships, forts, and batteries

recognized the authority of the Revolutionary Committee.

Earlier in the day copies of the Petropavlovsk resolution

had been taken by courier to the mainland and distributed in

89 Pravda 0 Krollshtadte, p. 1 1 7. 90 Ibid., pp. 1 2, 48.

86


Oranienbaum, Petrograd, and other towns in the vicinity.

That evening the Naval Air Squadron at Oranienbaum recog

nized the Revolutionary Committee and sent representatives

across the ice to Kronstadt. The revolt had begun to spread.

The following day, March 3, the Provisional Revolution

ary Committee began to publish a daily newspaper, the

lzvestiia Vremennogo Revoliutsionnogo Komiteta Matrosov,

Krasnoarmeitsev i Rabochikh gor. Kronshtadta [News of the

Provisional Revolutionary Committee of Sailors, Soldiers,

and Workers of the City of Kronstadt], which was to appear

without interruption until the 1 6th, the day before the de

cisive assault against the rebels. In the first issue, Petrichenko,

as chairman of the committee, appealed to the population of

Kronstadt for their support : "Comrades and citizens, the

Provisional Committee is determined that not a single drop

of blood be spilled. . . . The task of the Provisional Revo

lutionary Committee is to organize in the city and fortress,

through friendly and cooperative effort, the conditions for

fair and proper elections to the new Soviet. AND so, COM

RADES, FOR ORDER, FOR CALM, FOR FIRMNESS, FOR THE N EW

AND UPRIGHT SOCIALIST CONSTRUCTION THAT WILL P ROMOTE

THE WELL-BEING OF ALL THE TOILING P EOPLE."91 That same

day the Revolutionary Committee banned all exit from the

city without special permission. All military leaves were can

celed. Further, an 1 1 P . M . curfew was imposed and local

revtroiki established,92 as though in imitation of Zinoviev's

ad hoc Petro grad Defense Committee. Kronstadt had passed

the point of no return. With three Bolshevik leaders in jail,

and with the rebels in full control of the city, a trial of

strength with the government seemed inevitable.

91 Ibid., p. 46.

92 Ibid., p. 49; Pukhov, Kronshtadtskii miatezh, p. 69.

87

3. Kronstadt and the Russian Emigration

From the outset, the Soviet authorities recognized the danger

of the turbulence in Kronstadt. Given the acute discontent

among the Russian people, the revolt of the sailors might

spark a mass conflagration throughout the country. The

possibility of outside intervention gave added cause for con

cern, and Kronstadt's strategic position at the gateway to

the Neva placed Petrograd under serious jeopardy. Mindful

of historical parallels, the Bolsheviks might well recall that

four years earlier mutinous outbreaks in the armed forces,

in conjunction with strikes and demonstrations in the former

capital, had brought about the downfall of the autocracy.

Now their own regime faced a similar danger. If "Red Kron

stadt" and "Red Peter" could turn against the government,

what might be expected from the rest of the country?

Small wonder, therefore, that every effort was made to

discredit the rebels. This was no easy task, for Kronstadt

had long had a reputation for revolutionary fidelity. In 1917

Trotsky himself had called the Kronstadt sailors "the pride

and glory" of the Russian Revolution. Yet now he was at

pains to show that these were not the same loyal revolu

tionaries of four years ago but new elements of a completely

different stamp. Thousands of Kronstadt stalwarts had per

ished in the Civil War, argued Trotsky, and many of the

survivors had since been scattered around the country. Thus

the best men were gone, and the ranks of the fleet had been

filled with raw peasant recruits from the Ukraine and the

western borderlands who were largely indifferent to the rev

olutionary struggle and sometimes, owing to class and na

tional differences, openly hostile to the Soviet regime. It was

further charged that many of the recruits came from regions

where Makhno, Grigoriev, and other anti-Communist guerrillas had attracted a large following, and had brought with

them an "anarcho-bandit frame of mind"-indeed, in some

88

KRONST ADT & THE RUSSIAN EMIGRATION

cases had even fought in these partisan bands or in the White

armies of Denikin and W rangel. 1

As portrayed by the Bolsheviks, then, the Kronstadt sea

man of 1921 was "of a different social and psychological

makeup" from his predecessor of the Revolution and Civil

War : at worst, a corrupt and demoralized roughneck, undis

ciplined, foul-mouthed, and given to card playing and drink ;

at best, "a peasant lad in a sailor suit," a simple country

bumpkin sporting bell-bottom trousers and a heavily pomaded

pompadour to attract female admirers.2 To these green re

cruits from the countryside, said the Bolsheviks, the older

"salts" pinned an assortment of abusive epithets : Kleshniki,

a term derived from the broad-bottomed pants they favored ;

Zhorzhiki, or dandified hayseeds ; and, worst of all, lvanmory

( sea-yokels ) , a derisive parody of V oenmory ( sea-warriors ) ,

the proud title borne by veterans of the Civil War. 3

How accurate were such characterizations? There can be

little doubt that during the Civil War years a large turnover

had indeed taken place within the Baltic Fleet, and that many

of the old-timers had been replaced by conscripts from the

rural districts who brought with them the deeply felt discon

tents of the Russian peasantry. By 1921, according to official

figures, more than three-quarters of the sailors were of peas

ant origin, a substantially higher proportion than in 1917,

when industrial workers from the Petro grad area made up a

1 Trotskii, Kak vooruzhalas' revoliutsiia, III, part 1 , 203-204 ; Pukhov, Kronslztadtskii miatezh , pp. 40-4 1 ; Kornatovskii, ed., Kroll

shtadtskii miatezlz , pp. 1 2- 1 3 ; M. L. Lur'e, "Kronshtadtskii miatezh

1 9 2 1 goda v sovetskoi i beloi literature i pechati ," Krasnaia Letopis',

1 9 3 1 , No. 2, p. 226. 2 Slepkov, Kronslztadtskii miatezlz, p. 20; Pukhov, Kronsh tadtskii

miatezlz, p. 42; Leon Trotsky, "Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt," The

New International, April 1 9 3 8 , p. 104.

3 Kornatovskii, ed. , Kronsh tadtskii miatezh , p. 2 1 ; M . Kuz'min, Kronshtadtskii miatezlz, Leningrad, 1 93 1 , p . 1 7 . Cf. Katkov, "The Kronstadt Rising," St. A n tony's Papers, No. 6 , p. 2 1 .

89


sizable part of the fleet. 4 Petrichenko himself later acknowl

edged that m any of his comrades-in-arms were peasants

from the south aroused by the plight of the villagers back

home. Yet this does not necessarily mean that the behavioral

patterns of the fleet had undergone any fundamental change.

On the contrary, alongside the technical ratings, who were

drawn largely from the working class, there had always been

a large and unruly peasant element among the sailors, an

element lacking in discipline and prone to run amok at the

least provocation. Indeed, in 1 905 and 1 9 1 7 it was these

very youths from the countryside who had given Kronstadt

its reputation as a hotbed of revolutionary extremism. And

throughout the Civil War the Kronstadters had remained an

independent and headstrong lot, difficult to control and far

from constant in their support of the government. It was for

this reason that so many of them-especially the chronic

troublemakers and malcontents-had found themselves trans

ferred to new posts remote from the centers of Bolshevik

power. Of those who remained, many hankered for the free

doms they had won in 1 9 1 7 before the new regime began to

establish its one-party dictatorship throughout the country.

Actually, there was little to distinguish the old-timers

from the recent recruits in their midst. Both groups were

largely of peasant background ; both--the one while on fur

lough, the other before reporting for active duty-had seen

for themselves the misery in their native districts; and both

longed to cast off the coercive authority of the central gov

ernment. Not unexpectedly, when the rebellion finally

erupted, it was the older seamen, veterans of many years of

service ( dating in some cases from before the First World

War ) who took the lead. Petrichenko had joined the fleet

as early as 1 9 1 2, and had been a crew member of the Petro-

4 See the figures in PukhoY, Kronshtadtskii miatezh, p. 43 ; Petrash, M oriaki Baltiiskogo flota, pp. 20-2 1 ; and A. V. Bogdanoy, M oriakibaltiitsy v 1917 g., Moscow, 1 955, p. 1 5 .

90

KRONSTADT & THE RUSSIAN EMIGRATION

pavlovsk since 1918. His deputy chairman of the Provisional

Revolutionary Committee, an old "salt" named Yakovenko,

had fought on the barricades in 1917. Given their maturity

and experience, not to speak of their keen disillusionment

as former participants in the revolution, it was only natural

that these seasoned bluejackets should be thrust into the fore

front of the uprising. This was particularly true of the higher

ranking seamen and qualified technicians (Petrichenko, for

example, was a senior clerk on a battleship ) , who had been

carefully chosen from the most alert and literate recruits and

were accustomed to acting on their own initiative. The prox

imity of Petrograd, moreover, with its intense intellectual and

political life, had contributed towards sharpening their polit

ical awareness, and a good many had engaged in revolution

ary activity during 1917 and after. 5

The Kronstadters had long been regarded as the torch

bearers of revolutionary militancy, a reputation which re

mained largely untarnished throughout the Civil War, despite

their volatility and lack of discipline. As late as the autumn

of 1920, Emma Goldman recalled, the sailors were still held

up by the Communists themselves as a glowing example of

valor and unflinching courage ; on November 7, the third

anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power, they were in

the front ranks of the celebrations, and their reenactment of

the storming of the Winter Palace in Petrograd was wildly

acclaimed by the crowd.6 No one at that time spoke of any

"class degeneration" at Kronstadt. The allegation that polit

ically retarded muzhiks had diluted the revolutionary char

acter of the fleet, it would seem, was largely a device to ex

plain away dissident movements among the sailors, and had

been used as such as early as October 1918, following the

5 Cf. D. Fedotoff White, The Growth of the Red A rmy, Princeton, 1 944, p. 1 5 5 ; and Voline, La R evolution inconnue, pp. 4 1 1 - 1 2.

6 Emma Goldman, Trotsky Protests Too Much, Glasgow, 1 93 8 , p. 7.

91


abortive mutiny at the Petrograd naval station, when the

social composition of the fleet could not yet have undergone

any sweeping transformation.

The charge that the Kronstadters were mostly non-Rus

sians-conscripts from the Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, and

Finland, who bore strong national antagonisms against the

Soviet regime-also warrants a closer look. Some three or

four hundred names appear in the journal of the rebel move

ment, as signers of articles, proclamations, letters, poems,

and the like. So far as one can judge from these surnames

alone-admittedly an uncertain procedure-Great Russians

are in the overwhelming majority. There is no unusual pro

portion of Ukrainian, Germanic, Baltic, or other names. Yet

the picture is somewhat different when one looks at the mem

bership of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee, the

general staff of the insurrection: 7

1 . PETRICHENKO, senior clerk, battleship Petropav[ovsk

2. YAKOVENKO, telephone operator, Kronstadt district

3. Ososov, machinist, battleship Sevastopo[

4. ARKHIPOV, senior machinist

5. PEREPELKlN, electrician, battleship Sevastopol

6. PATRUSHEV, senior electrician, battleship Petropavlovsk

7. KUPOLOV, senior medical assistant

8. VERSHININ, seaman, battleship Sevastopol

9. TUKIN, worker, electro-mechanical factory

1 0. ROMANENKo, watchman of drydocks

1 1 . ORESHlN, principal of the Third Workers' School

1 2 . V ALK, sawmill worker

13. PAVLOV, worker, mine factory

14 . BAIKOV, transport chief of fortress construction depart

ment

15. KILGAST, deep-sea navigator

7 Pravda 0 Kronshtadte, pp. 1 3 1 , 1 58. For another list, with inter

esting comments about the members, see "Kak nachalos' vosstanie v

Kronshtadte," Miller Archives, File 5 M , No. 5 .

92


Of the 15 committee members, three ( Petrichenko, Yako

venko, and Romanenko) bore patently Ukrainian names and

two others (Valk and Kilgast) Germanic names. Petrichenko,

Yakovenko, and Kilgast, moreover, occupied key places on

the committee, as its chairman, deputy chairman, and secre

tary, respectively. According to Soviet sources, Petrichenko's

nationalist feelings were so strong that his shipmates nick

named him "Petliura," after the well-known Ukrainian

leader. 8 And we have it from Petrichenko himself that

"three-quarters" of the Kronstadt garrison were natives of

the Ukraine, some of whom had served with the anti-Bolshe

vik forces in the south before entering the Soviet navy. 9

What all this indicates is that national feelings probably

played some role in sparking the rebellion. But precisely how

great a role must, for want of further evidence, remain un

certain. Much clearer are the humble social origins of the

committee members. Sailors-normally of peasant and work

ing-class background-formed a preponderant majority : ap

parently there were nine of them, mostly qualified ratings

from the Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol, the powder kegs of

the rising. In addition, there were four workmen and two

white-collar employees ( a school principal and a transporta

tion official) . Thus the leadership of the movement was un

deniably plebeian, unlike that of the Whites, and this was

clearly embarrassing to the authorities; who spared no effort

to prove that the ringleaders actually sprang from antiprole

tarian social groups. Vershinin, a seaman from the Sevastopol

who fell into Bolshevik hands at an early stage of the revolt,

was said to be a "speculator" and dandified peasant, or

Zhorzhik. Worse still, Pavlov was identified as a former de

tective, Baikov as a property holder in Kronstadt, and Tukin

8 Krasnaia Gazeta, March 1 1 , 1 92 ! .

9 Petrichenko e t al. t o General Wrangel, May 3 1 , 1 92 1 , Giers

Archives, File 8 8 ; U.S. Charge d'Affaires in Helsingfors to Secretary of State, April 22, 1 92 1 , National Archives, 8 6 1 .00/862 8 .

93


as an ex-gendarme who had once owned no less than six

houses and three shops in Petro grad. Another committee

member, Kilgast, had reportedly been convicted of embez

zling government funds in the Kronstadt transportation de

partment but had been released in a general amnesty on the

third anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.10

Efforts to discredit the Provisional Revolutionary Com

mittee continued long after the rebellion had been suppressed.

Apart from defaming the character of its members, Soviet

writers sought to associate them with the political opposi

tion. Petrichenko was repeatedly identified as a Left SR,

Valk and Romanenko as Mensheviks, and Oreshin as a Pop

ulist Socialist. Another figure, Lamanov, who was said to be

the chief ideologist of the movement and editor of its daily

newspaper, was an SR Maximalist. 11 Unfortunately, no re

liable information has come to light to confirm or deny these

affiliations. Of Petrichenko, however, we know from con

temporary Soviet records that he was a "former Commu

nist," having enrolled during the "party week" recruitment

drive of August 1919, when regular qualifications for ad

mission were suspended, and that he left during the next

re-registration period.12

Petrichenko's brief association with the Communists was

not untypical-Kilgast, the secretary of the Revolutionary

Committee, being another case in point. Thousands of Baltic

sailors followed the same course. By March 1921 party

membership in Kronstadt was only half of what it had been

just six months before. Some of the apostates seized the first

10 Petrogradskaia Pravda, March 1 1 , 1 92 1 ; Komatovskii, ed . ,

Kronshtadtskii miatezh, p. 34; Pukhov, Kronshtadtskii miatezh, p. 77. 11 Slepkov, Kronsh tadtskii miatezh, p. 3 3 ; Komatovskii, ed., Kron

shtadtskii miatezh, p. 1 56n ; I . Vardin, R evoliutsiia i men'shevizm,

Moscow, 1 925, p. 1 40. More will be said about Lamanov and the

Maximalists in Chapter 5 .

12 Krasnaia Gazeta, March 1 1 , 1 92 1 . Cf. the archival document

in Kornatovskii, ed . , Kronshtadtskii miatezh, p. 228.

94


opportunity to go home on leave. Petrichenko returned to his

native village in April 1920 and apparently remained until

September or October, having had ample time to see the

Bolshevik food detachments in action and to build up con

siderable hostility against the government. The authorities,

he later told an American journalist, had arrested him more

than once on suspicion of counterrevolutionary activity. He

had even tried to join the Whites, only to be turned away

as a former Bolshevik. Yet he insisted that the Kronstadt

Revolutionary Committee had no ties with any political

group. "Our revolt," he said, "was an elemental movement

to get rid of Bolshevik oppression; once that is done, the

will of the people will manifest itself. "13

THE chief object of Bolshevik propaganda was to show that

the revolt was not a spontaneous outbreak of mass protest

but a new counterrevolutionary conspiracy, following the

pattern established during the Civil War. According to the

Soviet press, the sailors, influenced by Mensheviks and SR's

in their ranks, had shamelessly cast their lot with the "White

Guards," led by a former tsarist general named Kozlovsky.

"Behind the backs of the SR's and Mensheviks," declared

Pravda, "the ex-tsarist generals have already bared their

fangs."14 This, in tum, was said to be part of a carefully

laid plot hatched in Paris by Russian emigres in league with

French counterintelligence. Furthermore, a network of Red

Cross organizations-the International Red Cross, the Amer

ican Red Cross, and the Russian Red Cross in Finland-was

accused of acting as a front for the plotters. On March 2

the Council of Labor and Defense issued an order, over the

signatures of Lenin and Trotsky, outlawing General Kozlov

sky and his confederates and denouncing the Petropavlovsk

13 New York Times, March 3 1 , 1 92 1 ; Quarton to Secretary of State, April 9 , 1 92 1 , National Archives, 86 1 .00/8740.

14 Pravda, March 5, 1 92 1 .

95


resolution as a "Black Hundred-SR" document. Martial law

was extended from the city of Petro grad to the whole prov

ince, and Zinoviev's Defense Committee received emergency

powers to deal with the insurrection. 15

As proof that the rising had been concocted by anti-Soviet

groups in Paris, Bolshevik spokesmen pointed to a rash of

French newspaper reports of a revolt in Kronstadt that ap

peared two weeks before the actual event. These reports, said

Trotsky in a statement to the British and American press,

clearly betrayed the nefarious schemes already brewing

among the Russian emigres and their Entente supporters. The

choice of Kronstadt as their target, said Trotsky, was dic

tated by its proximity to Petro grad and its easy accessibility

from the west, and also by the recent influx of unreliable

elements into the Baltic Fleet.16 Trotsky's allegations were

repeated by Lenin in a speech to the Tenth Congress of the

Communist party on March 8. I n back of the revolt, Lenin

declared, "looms the familiar figure of the White Guard

general." "It is perfectly clear," he said, citing stories from

Le Malin and L'Echo de Paris, "that this is the work of SR's

and emigre White Guards. "17

Since the Paris news reports played a central role in the

Bolshevik case for a White conspiracy, it is well to look into

their content and origins. What, precisely, did they say?

The announcement in Le Malin, appearing on February 13

under the headline "Moscow Takes Measures Against Kron

stadt Rebels," stated that a rising had broken out at the

Kronstadt naval base, and that the Bolshevik authorities

had initiated steps to prevent it from spreading to Petro grad.

On February 14 Malin carried a second article attributing

the revolt to the arrest of a sailors' delegation which had gone

to Moscow to ask for better rations. The situation in Kron-

15 Ibid., March 3, 1 92 1 . 16 Trotskii, Kak vooruzhalas' revoliutsiia, III, part 1 , 203-204.

17 Desiatyi s"ezd RKP(b), p. 3 3 .

96

KRONSTADT & TIlE RUSSIAN EMIGRATION

stadt, said Matin, had meanwhile deteriorated, and the rebels

had "trained their guns on Petrograd. " That same day the

story appeared in L' Echo de Paris with the added news that

the sailors had arrested the chief commissar of the fleet and

launched several warships (presumably aided by an ice

breaker) against Petrograd. The insurgents, according to a

second item of February 15, were counting on the support

of the Petro grad garrison, and the authorities were carrying

out mass arrests in the Petrograd area. Between February

13 and 15 similar reports appeared in other Western jour

nals. An account in the New York Times went so far as to

claim that the sailors had taken full control in Petrograd

and were defying the troops sent by Trotsky to dislodge

them.18

Nothing of the sort, of course, took place at Kronstadt or

at any other Baltic base during February 1921. False rumors

of this type-stimulated by wishful thinking and by the

general ferment inside Russia-were by no means rare at

the time. Yet, in the case of Kronstadt, they do foreshadow

( even to the arrest of a leading fleet commissar) what was

actually to happen two weeks later. Some historians suggest

that they had been sparked by the stormy Second Conference

of Baltic Fleet Communists, when the sailors raised the cry

for greater democracy in the fleet's political administration.19

But this conjecture may be safely ruled out since the bogus

reports antedated the conference (held on February 15) by

several days. Indeed, similar stories had appeared even earlier

in the Russian emigre press, providing the basis for the

Western accounts. On February 12 Valia Rossii ( Russian

Freedom), an SR journal in Prague, reported the outbreak

of "a major uprising in the Russian Baltic Fleet." And two

days before, the Paris Obshchee Delo (The Common Cause),

18 New York Times, March 1 4 , 192 1 .

19 See Mett, La Commune de Cronstadt, p . 80; and Katkov, 'The

Kronstadt Rising," St. A n tony's Papers, No. 6, p. 55.

97


edited by the veteran populist Vladimir Burtsev, had an

nounced the same news under the headline of "Rising of

Sailors in Kronstadt." This was probably the earliest such

report, and it contained virtually all the elements which were

to turn up in succeeding accounts and which anticipate so

strikingly the real thing a fortnight later: that the Kronstadt

sailors had risen against the government, occupied the port,

and arrested the chief commissar of the fleet; that they were

planning to launch military operations against Petrograd;

and that the Petro grad authorities had proclaimed a state of

siege in the city and were carrying out wide-scale arrests.20

The rumors appear to have come from a single source: a

correspondent for the "Russunion". news agency stationed

in Helsingfors, a notorious center of anti-Soviet propaganda.

What touched them off, however, remains unclear. Beyond

the general unrest within the fleet, the reported detention in

Moscow of a delegation from Kronstadt may have been

partly to blame. The Baltic commandant Raskolnikov, so the

story goes, warned that the sailors might open fire on Petro

grad unless their comrades were released, but the govern

ment refused and even threatened Kronstadt with reprisals.21

The Kronstadt Revolutionary Committee rejected the

charges of conspiracy as sheer calumny, unsupported by a

single shred of truth but revealing only the baseness and de

ception to which the authorities had sunk. In a declaration

to the workers and peasants of Russia, the committee issued

an indignant reply: "Our enemies are trying to deceive you.

They say that the Kronstadt rebellion was organized by

Mensheviks, SR's, Entente spies, and tsarist generals. The

leading role they assign to Paris. Nonsense! If our rebellion

was made in Paris, then the moon was made in Berlin. "22

To the charge that White officers were leading the movement

2° Obshchee Delo, February 1 0, 1 92 1 . 21 Ibid. , January 2, 1 9 2 1 . 22 Pravda 0 Kronshtadte, p . 1 20.

98


the committee's response was equally firm ; "In Kronstadt,

total power is in the hands only of the revolutionary sailors,

Red Army soldiers, and workers, and not of the White

Guards headed by some General Kozlovsky, as the slander

ous Moscow radio proclaims." "We have only one general

here," declared the rebels sardonically, "commissar of the

Baltic Fleet Kuzmin. And he has been arrested."23 In order

to demonstrate the popular character of the revolt, the Rev

olutionary Committee published a full list of its members. As

we already know, no officers of any rank appear among the

names, let alone a general, but only ordinary sailors and

workingmen. "These are our generals : our Brusilovs, Ka

menevs, etc.," declared the Kronstadt Izvestiia, alluding to the

abundance of former tsarist officers within the Bolsheviks'

own camp. 24

Nevertheless, a General Kozlovsky did exist; and he was

in Kronstadt in March 1921. What role, if any, did he play

in the uprising? Alexander Nikolaevich Kozlovsky was an

army career officer with a long and distinguished record of

military service. Born in 1861 in the town of Krasnoe Selo

near Petrograd, he was graduated from Cavalry Cadet

School, Artillery Officers' School, and the Imperial Military

Academy, and during the First World War rose to the rank

of Major General in the artillery branch. Following the Bol

shevik Revolution, he became one of the many ex-imperial

officers who were pressed into service as "military specialists"

(voenspetsy ) , and in 1921 he was chief of artillery at the

Kronstadt fortress. When trouble erupted at the beginning

of March, the Bolsheviks at once denounced him as the evil

genius of the movement. Kozlovsky was outlawed, and his

wife and children were seized in Petrograd as hostages. Three

other former officers serving under his command ( Burkser,

Kostromitinov, and Shirmanovsky) were linked with him as

fellow conspirators. Kozlovsky himself maintained that he

23 Ibid. , pp. 57, 65. 24 Ibid., pp. 1 3 1 , 1 58.

99


was singled out by the authorities because he happened to

be the only ex-tsarist general in Kronstadt at the time, the

sole convenient actor to fill the fictitious role of ·the White

Guard commander plotting to crush the revolution.25

This may indeed be true. Yet, from the available evi

dence, it is clear that Kozlovsky and his colleagues did in

fact play a part in the events of March 192 1. When the

commander of the fortress fled to the mainland in the early

hours of the revolt, Kozlovsky declined to succeed him, but

he nevertheless remained at his regular post as director of

artillery. The Provisional Revolutionary Committee appoint

ed another artillery specialist as fortress commander, former

Lieutenant Colonel E . N. Solovianov, with whom Kozlovsky

worked in close cooperation. Most of their fellow voenspetsy

-in particular those of the artillery branch-apparently fol

lowed suit and placed themselves at the disposal of the in

surgents, furnishing them with technical advice and assistance.

These ex-officers had little use for the Bolshevik regime.

Typifying their attitude was a remark quoted earlier and

purportedly made by Kozlovsky on March 2 to the Bolshe

vik commissar of the fortress : "Your time is past. Now I

shall do what has to be done."

From the very outset, the specialists threw themselves

into the task of planning military operations on behalf of the

insurrection. On March 2, as Kozlovsky himself admitted,

he and his colleagues advised the Revolutionary Committee

to take the offensive at once in order to gain the initiative

against the Bolsheviks.26 The officers worked out a plan for

an immediate landing at Oranienbaum ( on the mainland

some five miles to the south) in order to seize its military

equipment and m ake contact with sympathetic army units,

then to move against Petrograd before the government had

25 A. S. Pukhov, "Kronshtadt vo vlasti vragov revoliutsii," Kras

naia Letopis', 1 93 1 , No. 1 , p. 23; Pravda 0 Kronshtadte, p. 1 4.

26 Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik, April 5, 1 92 1 , pp. 5-6.

100

The City of Kronstadt

The Battleship SCl'nstopol

I I:;:

:.

Lie

ute

na

nt

Co

lon

el

E.

N.

So

lov

ian

ov

A

Kro

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efu

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e i

n F

inla

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--- - - - --- - --._--------

Kronstadt Refugees Arriving at Terijoki

Kronstadt Refugees at Work in Finland

Lenin (right-front) with party delegates fresh from Kronstadt victory.

Behind Lenin is Voroshilov (in dark coat).


time to muster any effective opposition. The officers also

proposed a surprise raid on the Oranienbaum flour mills to

obtain badly needed food supplies. In still another plan, since

no icebreakers were available to do the job ( Kronstadt's

large icebreaker, the Ermak, had gone to Petrograd for fuel),

the artillery specialists urged the sailors to use the guns of

the fortress and surrounding batteries to free the Petropav

lovsk and Sevastopoi, which were frozen in the ice and

partially blocking each other's line of fire, and also to create

a moat around the island so as to render it inaccessible to

an infantry invasion. 27

For all their activity, however, the officers remained in a

purely advisory capacity throughout the rebellion. They had

no share, so far as one can tell, in initiating or directing

the revolt, or in framing its political program, which was

altogether alien to their way of thinking. No officers took

part in drawing up the Petropavlovsk resolution, none ad

dressed the mass meeting in Anchor Square, none attended

the March 2 conference in the House of Education, none

served on the Provisional Revolutionary Committee. Their

role, rather, was confined to providing technical advice, just

as it had been under the Bolsheviks. Some of the rebels

later told Fyodor Dan when they were in the same Petro grad

jail that Kozlovsky merely carried on his duties as before

and enjoyed no other authority in their movement.28 Given

the sailors' independent spirit and traditional hatred of of

ficers, it is unlikely in any case that Kozlovsky and his col

leagues could have won real influence among them. The Pro

visional Revolutionary Committee, which remained firmly

in the saddle throughout the revolt, showed its distrust of

the specialists by repeatedly rejecting their counsel, how

ever sound and appropriate it might be. Despite the urging

27 Pukhov, Kronshtadtskii miatezlz, pp. 8 3 - 8 5 ; Quartan to Secre

tary of State, April 2 3 , 1 92 1 , National Archives, 8 6 1 .00/ 86 1 9 . 28 D an, D va goda skitanii, p. 1 54 .

101


of the officers, the sailors did not blast the ice around the

island or even try to free the icebound battleships. Nor did

they attempt to seize a bridgehead on the mainland and

exploit the early confusion in the Bolshevik camp. Instead,

they limited their offensive efforts to sending a small de

tachment over the ice to Oranienbaum on the night of

March 2-3, after receiving news that the Naval Air Squadron

there had voted to join the revolt, but the expedition was

greeted by a hail of machine-gun fire and forced to with

draw.29

WHEN all this is said, however, the most important question

remains to be answered: Was there any truth to the Bolshe

vik charges that the revolt had been masterminded by Rus

sian emigres in Paris? Certainly, the expatriates indulged in

wishful thinking about an anti-Soviet uprising. Much was

said and written on the subject, particularly by a group known

as the National Center (or National Union)., a loose-knit

coalition of Kadets, Octobrists, and other moderates, with

headquarters in Paris and branches in a number of other

European capitals. Take, for example, an article by the

prominent Kadet leader F. I. Rodichev, which appeared in

Obshchee Dela-the principal organ of the National Center

-ten days before the rebellion erupted. "To take Petrograd,"

wrote Rodichev, "would not be difficult. The difficulty would

be to feed the city and organize it. Once this is prepared, then

the hour to act will not be far off. Petrograd is closest of all

to the borders open from the west. It is this point in Soviet

Russia which is easiest to reach for the work of regenera

tion. . . . It is time to begin. "30

At the time, however, open threats of this sort did not raise

undue concern among the Bolshevik leaders. Far more alarm-

29 Petrichenko, Pravda a Kranshtadtskikh sabytiiakh, pp. 8-9.

30 F. Rodishchev [sic], "V poiskakh spaseniia," Obshchee Dela,

February 20, 1 92 1 .

102


ing were the unknown conspiracies which they suspected the

exiles of hatching in secret. Nor were their suspicions entirely

groundless. Hitherto undisclosed evidence reveals that plans

for just such an uprising had been drawn up within the N a

tional Center several weeks before the outbreak in Kron

stadt. Before describing this evidence, however, a brief ac

count of the National Center's past activities is in order.

The National Center originally came into being in 1918,

at the beginning of the Civil War, as a self-proclaimed "un

derground organization formed in Russia for the struggle

against the Bolsheviks."31 Founded in Moscow by A. V.

Kartashev, P. B. Struve, and other erstwhile leaders of the

Kadet party, its chief object was to overturn Lenin's govern

ment and establish a constitutional regime in its place. The

Center concentrated the bulk of its resources in Moscow and

along the Baltic coast; there were branches in Petrograd

and at the fortresses of Krasnaya Gorka and Kronstadt. In

1919 it was involved in the attempt by General Yudenich,

aided by British equipment and naval support, to take

Petrograd. Kartashev, a former professor of church history

at Petro grad Theological Academy and Minister of Religious

Affairs in the Provisional Government of 1917, sat on Yu

denich's five-man Political Council; and among the Center's

agents at Kronstadt, according to Soviet sources,32 was Pro

fessor D. D. Grimm, the former rector of Petro grad Univer

sity, who was to figure prominently in the events of 1921.

Throughout the Yudenich offensive, Kronstadt remained

loyal to the Bolsheviks, withstanding British air and torpedo

attacks in which several of its warships were sunk or dis

abled. Krasnaya Gorka, by contrast, went over to the Whites

and opened fire on Kronstadt when it refused to follow suit.

31 "Obrazovanie severo-zapadnogo Pravitel'stva," A rkhiv russkoi

revoliutsii, I, 1 922, p. 295. Cf. A. S. Lukomskii, Vospominalliia, 2 vols., Berlin, 1 922, II, 1 1 6.

32 A. S. Pukhov, Baltiiskii fiot n a zashchite Petrograda (1919 g. ) ,

Moscow, 1 958, pp. 65-66.

103

KRONSTAD T & THE RUSSIAN EMIGRATION

There is evidence that the National Center was involved,

possibly with the connivance of British intelligence;33 but the

mutiny was crushed when, following a devastating bombard

ment by the Petropavlovsk, a detachment of Kronstadt sail

ors and Red soldiers captured the fort by storm.

In the wake of Yudenich's defeat, many of the Center's

adherents were arrested by the Cheka and condemned to

execution or long terms in prison. But a number of its leaders,

among them Professor Kartashev, were able to flee the

country, and, taking up new headquarters in Paris, they im

mediately started rebuilding their organization. By the end

of 1920 the National Center could boast of affiliates in Lon

don, Berlin, Helsingfors ( where its chief agent was Professor

Grimm) , and other centers of the White emigration. Besides

Kartashev, Struve, and Rodichev, its leadership included such

eminent Kadets and Octobrists as V. D. Nabokov and A. I.

Guchkov, as well as several right-wing populists, notably

V. L. Burtsev, the editor of Obshchee Delo. Some of the most

distinguished liberals, however, such as Pavel Miliukov and

M. M. Vinaver, refused to join, having abandoned hope that

Russia could be liberated by an armed invasion, even with

Allied assistance. 34

By late 1920 the National Center had made a sufficient

recovery to prepare for a European-wide Congress of Na

tional Union. The congress eventually met in Paris in June

192 1 and elected a Russian National Committee, with Pro

fessor Kartashev as chairman, whose goal was "the liberation

33 Ibid., pp. 68-74; Izvestiia V TsIK, June 1 8 , 1 92 1 . See also Louis Fischer, The Soviets in World Affairs, 2 vols. , Princeton, 1 95 1 , I,

206. Paul Dukes, a British agent in Russia during this period whom

the Soviets accused of complicity in the affair, denies any personal

involvement and any British connection with the National Center. See his Red Dusk and the Morrow, New York, 1 922, p. 223; and

The Story of "ST 25," London, 1 93 8, p. 3 1 4.

3 4 P. N. Miliukov, Russia Today and Tomorrow, New York, 1 922,

pp. 1 2 5-26.

104


of Russia from Communist slavery."35 Ihis, of course, had

been the objective of the National Center ever since its forma

tion in 1918, but one by one the White commanders

Yudenich, Ko1chak, Denikin, Wrangel-had gone down in

defeat. General Wrangel, however, succeeded in evacuating a

large part of his Russian Army, as it was called, with their

weapons intact. Some 70 or 80 thousand men were interned

at Constantinople, Gallipoli, and Lemnos, and thousands

more in Serbia and Bulgaria, retaining their military ranks

and discipline. A protege of France, which in August 1920

had recognized his regime as the de facto government of

South Russia (the only country to accord him this honor ) ,

Wrangel placed his forces under French protection. The

armada in which he had made his escape, including a dread

nought, several destroyers, and dozens of other ships from

the Black Sea Fleet with some 5,000 crew members, was

interned at the Tunisian port of Bizerte. In November 1920

Paris withdrew its recognition of Wrangel's defunct govern

ment, but continued to feed his troops on "humane grounds,"

meanwhile urging him to disband.36 But their efforts came to

nothing. "General Wrangel," noted the British envoy in

Constantinople in March 1921, at the time of the Kron

stadt rebellion, "may be expected vigorously to oppose any

suggestions to disband his formations, as he contends that

it is particularly desirable that his army, which is the only

anti-Bolshevik force outside Russia, should be ready to

benefit by the present events in that country. "37

To return to the activities of the National Center, in the

archives of that organization is an unsigned handwritten

manuscript labeled "Top Secret" and bearing the title "Mem-

350bshchee Delo, June 6, 1 92 1 .

3 6 P . N . Wrangel, The Memoirs of General Wrangel, London, 1 9 3 0,

pp. 3 3 8-3 9 .

37 S i r H . Rumbold t o Lord Curzon, March 1 7, 1 92 L Great Britain,

Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919-1939, First Series, XII,

8 3 8 .

105


orandum on the Question of Organizing an Uprising in Kron

stadt."38 The Memorandum is dated "1921" and puts forward

a detailed contingency plan for an anticipated revolt in Kron

stadt. From internal evidence, it is clear that the plan was

drawn up in January or early February 1921 by an agent of

the Center located either in Viborg or Helsingfors. He pre

dicts that a rising of the sailors would erupt during "the

coming spring. " There are "numerous and unmistakable

signs" of discontent with the Bolsheviks, he writes, and if a

"small group of individuals, by quick and decisive action,

should seize power in Kronstadt," the rest of the fleet and

garrison would eagerly follow them. "Among the sailors,"

he adds, "such a group has already been formed, ready and

able to take the most energetic actions." And if outside sup

port can be secured, he concludes, "one may count entirely

on the success of the rising."

The author is obviously well acquainted with the situation

in Kronstadt. There is a long and well-informed analysis of

the base's fortifications, in which the danger of artillery

bombardment from Krasnaya Gorka is carefully assessed but

discounted as a serious threat to the rebellion. The docu

ment, moreover, stresses the need to prepare food supplies

for the rebels well in advance of the insurrection. On this

point its author is most emphatic. With French assistance, he

writes, stores of food must be placed on transport vessels in

the Baltic, which will await orders to proceed to Kronstadt.

As a military task force, he continues, the Russian Army of

General Wrangel must be mobilized, supported by a French

naval squadron and units of the Black Sea Fleet at Bizerte.

(An underlying assumption of the Memorandum is that the

revolt would not occur until after the springtime thaw, when

the ice had melted and Kronstadt was immune from an in-

38 "Dokladnaia zapiska po voprosu ob organizatsii vosstaniia v Kronshtadte," manuscript, Columbia Russian Archive. For the full

text of the Memorandum in English translation, see Appendix A.

106


vasion from the mainland, and when the necessary food

supplies had been prepared and Wrangel's forces made

ready for action.)

On the arrival of the Russian Army, the Memorandum

continues, all authority in Kronstadt would pass immediately

into the hands of its commanding officer. The fortress would.

then serve as "an invulnerable base" for a landing on the

mainland "to overthrow Soviet authority in Russia." The

success of the operation, however, would hinge on the willing

ness of the French to provide money, food, and naval sup

port. Otherwise a revolt would take place all the same and

would be doomed to failure. If the French government should

agree, the Memorandum concludes, then it would be desirable

for it to appoint "an individual with whom the representa

tives of the organizers of the rebellion can enter into more

detailed agreements on this subject and to whom they may

communicate the details of the plan of the uprising and

further actions, as well as more exact information concern

ing the funds required for the organization and further fi

nancing of the uprising. "

Although the author's identity is not known, what evidence

there is points to Professor G. F. Tseidler, a Russian expa

triate in Viborg. Tseidler had been director of the Russian

Red Cross in Petrograd until the Bolshevik Revolution, when

he emigrated to Finland and became head of the Russian Red

Cross branch in that country. He was closely associated with

David Grimm, his former colleague at Petrograd University,

who now served in Helsingfors as chief agent of the National

Center (with which Tseidler was also connected) and as

General Wrangel's official representative in Finland. As a

Red Cross official, Tseidler was particularly concerned with

the question of food supply in Kronstadt and Petrograd, a

subject which occupies a central place in the Secret Mem

orandum. In October 1920, for instance, he sent a report to

the Paris headquarters of the American Red Cross on the

107


food crisis in Petrograd.;;9 More significant is a telegram he

addressed to the National Center in Paris some months

later : "The situation requires an immediate decision on the

questions relating to my memorandum on necessary food

supply. Real activity can erupt at any time."40 The date on

the telegram is "28/ /1921." Unfortunately, no month

is given, but February would seem very likely, the 28th

being the date when the Petrograd strikes reached their

climax and the Petropavlovsk resolution was adopted in

Kronstadt. At the bottom of the telegram is the handwritten

notation "Right!" followed by the signature of G. L. Vladi

mirov, a former tsarist general who acted as a m ilitary ex

pert for the National Center. The "memorandum on neces

sary food supply" to which Tseidler refers may well be the

Secret Memorandum described above. Further evidence of

Tseidler's authorship is the fact that, on April 5, 1921,

shortly after the Bolsheviks reoccupied Kronstadt, he pub

lished a leaflet in Viborg lamenting the failure of the emigres

to provision the insurgents and offering a new plan for sup

plying Petro grad in case of a fresh outburst there.41 During

the March rising itself, as we shall see, Tseidler was second

to none in his efforts to supply the rebels in time to avert a

disaster.

Apart from the Secret Memorandum, there are other indi

cations that the National Center had been watching Kron

stadt during the early weeks of 1921. It is worth noting, for

example, that the fictitious newspaper reports of a rising

among the sailors in February originated with the Russunion

39 New York Tribune, October 7, 1 92 1 .

40 Columbia Russian Archive.

41 G. Tseidler, 0 snabzhenii Peterburga, Viborg, 1 92 1 . One piece of evidence, however, points to the possibility of a different author

with the initials "L. G . " During the rebellion an article signed by "L. G ." appeared in a Helsingfors journal published by associates

of Kartashev and Grimm, and its contents bear a certain similarity

to the Secret Memorandum. See L. G . , "Boesposobnost' Kronshtadta," Novaia R usskaia Zhizn', March 1 5 and 1 7 , 1 92 1 .

108


agency, an organization of emigre journalists closely tied to

the National Center. Vladimir Burtsev, a leading figure in

the Center and editor of its organ Obshchee Dela, the jour

nal in which the stories first appeared, was at the same time

one of the heads of Russunion, and the offices of Obshchee

Dela served as the agency's Paris headquarters.42 Perhaps

the rumors merely reflected the earnest wishes of the e_xpa

triates that such a rebellion would soon erupt. This, however,

was not the opinion of the London Daily Herald, a left-wing

Labour journal, well-informed if at times uncritical in its pro

Bolshevik sympathies. The stories in Malin and other news

papers, wrote the Herald's diplomatic correspondent, revealed

what was "confidently expected to happen" in Kronstadt, for

they betrayed the existence of a counterrevolutionary plot

hatched by White exiles with Allied encouragement. 43 How

ever dubious this assertion, it is entirely possible, in the light

of the Secret �'lemorandum, that the National Center at least

informed the French of its plans in the Baltic and asked

for help in carrying them out. 44

In any case, there is no question that plans were afoot

within the National Center to support an anticipated rising

at Kronstadt. And to judge from the Secret Memorandum,

the Center's Baltic agents had no intention of confining

themselves to a mere auxiliary role ; their object, rather,

was to enter into active collaboration with the rebels at the

earliest possible moment, after having secured the coop

eration of the French High Comm and "in the preparation

42 It m ay also be noted that the Russian National Committee,

chaired by Professor Kartashev, held its meetings there during the

summer of 1 92 1 . See the announcement in Obshchee Delo, June 2 3 ,

1 92 1 .

43 Daily Herald, March 7 , 1 92 1 .

44 According to the Daily Herald's Riga correspondent, White

plans for a rising in Kronstadt had been communicated to both the

French and the British sometime in January 1 9 2 1 by the well-known

SR Boris Savinkov: ibid., March 1 8 , 1 92 1 .

109


and direction of the uprising." Ultimately, it is clear, the

Center intended to exploit the revolt for its own purposes.

But were prior links in fact established with the sailors

who carried out the rebellion? In the Secret Memorandum,

written during the first weeks of 1921, the author speaks of

"the presence of a closely knit group of energetic organizers

for the rising," and says that his information "emanated

from Kronstadt," presumably from sources friendly to the

Center. That an organized group of would-be insurgents had

already sprung into being is by no means impossible or even

unlikely � for disaffection among the sailors had been growing

for several months. Nor is it unlikely that a rebel organiza

tion, if it did exist,.

would have included future members of

the Provisional Revolutionary Committee. Petrichenko's

dominant role from the earliest hours of the rising-his

signature on the Petropav[ovsk resolution, his speech in

Anchor Square, his chairmanship of the March 2 conference

and of the Revolutionary Committee which sprang from it

encourages speculation about his activities before the out

break. Then, too, there is the assertion by another committee

member that "we" rescinded the arrest of Kalinin on March

I-a day before the committee had even been formed.45

It is conceivable, then, that Petrichenko and his confed

erates were the "closely knit group" on whom the Secret

Memorandum pinned its hopes, and even that they had been

approached by agents of the National Center in January or

February of 1921. There is undeniable evidence-which will

be examined later-that the Revolutionary Committee en

tered into an agreement with the Center after the rebellion

was suppressed and some of its members found sanctuary

45 "Interv'iu s chlenami Vremennogo Revoliutsionnogo Komiteta,"

manuscript, Hoover Library. Cf. the mysterious reference to a letter

from Kronstadt, dated February 2 1 , 1 92 1 , in which a "participant of

the uprising" declares that he and his comrades will fight to the end

to overthrow the Bolsheviks: Baron Rozen to M. N. Giers, March

12, 1 92 1 , Miller Archives, File 5M, No. 5 .

110


in Finland, and one cannot rule out the possibility that this

was the continuation of a longstanding relationship. Yet a

careful search has yielded no evidence to support such a

belief. Nothing has come to light to show that the Secret

Memorandum was ever put into practice or that any links

had existed between the emigres and the sailors before the

revolt. On the contrary, the rising bore the earmarks of

spontaneity, and the fact that a group of determined leaders

quickly rose to the forefront does not provide evidence to the

contrary. For every uprising, even the most elemental, has

its "agitators" and "ringleaders" who rouse the discontented

to action, who organize and direct them. In the case of

Kronstadt, there was little in the behavior of the rebels to

suggest any careful advance preparation. Had there been a

prearranged plan, surely the sailors would have waited a few

weeks longer for the ice to melt, thereby eliminating the dan

ger of an infantry assault and simultaneously freeing the two

battleships for action and opening up a supply route from

the west. The rebels, moreover, allowed Kalinin to return to

Petrograd, though he would have made a valuable hostage.

Further, they made no attempt to take the offensive, sending

only a token force across the ice to Oranienbaum. Significant,

too, is the large number of Communists who took part in the

movement. In the early stages at least, the Kronstadters ap

parently saw themselves not as revolutionary conspirators

but as a pressure group for social and political reform. This,

as George Katkov points out, was also what the Petrograd

authorities believed, otherwise they would not have sent

Kalinin and Kuzmin to Kronstadt on March 1, nor would

Vasiliev, the Bolshevik chairman of the Kronstadt Soviet,

have presided at the mass meeting in Anchor Square at which

the Petropavlovsk resolution was put to a vote. 46

46 Katkov, "The Kronstadt Rising," St. A ntony's Papers, No. 6,

p. 27. Cf. Daniels, "The Kronstadt Revolt," A merican Slavic and

East European Review, x, 246-47.

111

KRONST A.DT & THE RUSSIA.N EMIGRATION

The sailors needed no outside encouragement to raise the

banner of insurrection. For months their grievances had been

accumulating: inadequate food and fuel, curtailment of

leaves, bureaucratic administration of the fleet, reports from

home of Bolshevik oppression. In January 192 1, as we have

seen, no fewer than 5,000 Baltic seamen had resigned from

the Communist party in disgust with the policies of the re

gime. Desertion and absence without leave were on the in

crease. During furloughs, the sailors had a vivid glimpse of

food requisitions and were themselves exposed to search and

seizure by the ubiquitous roadblock detachments. By Feb

ruary 192 1, therefore, Kronstadt was clearly ripe for a re

bellion. What set it off were not the machinations of emigre

conspirators and foreign intelligence agents but the wave of

peasant risings throughout the country and the labor dis

turbances in neighboring Petro grad. And as the revolt un

folded, it followed the pattern of earlier outbursts against the

central government from 1905 through the Civil War, against

tsarist and Bolshevik regimes alike. A particularly striking

forerunner of March 192 1 was the mutiny at the Petrograd

naval base in October 19 18, which anticipated Kronstadt

in its protest against grain requisitioning and against the ap

pointment of political commissars from above, in its slogans

of "free soviets" and "Down with the commissarocracy,"

and in the prominent role among its instigators of Left SR's,

Maximalists, anarchists, and nonparty rebels of an ultra

radical stripe.

The Kronstadters themselves, both during the rising and

afterwards in exile, indignantly rejected all government ac

cusations of collaboration with counterrevolutionary groups

either at home or abroad. They denied in particular any

intention to restore the old order. "We are defenders of the

power of a1l the toilers," declared the rebel I zvestiia, "and

against the tyrannical authority of any single party."47 Their

47 Pravda 0 Krollshtadte, p. 1 20.

112


revolt, they insisted, had been completely spontaneous from

start to finish. No agitators had been active in their midst

before the explosion, no anti-Bolshevik literature had circu

lated through their ranks, no foreign money or assistance

had reached them at any time. Such is the testimony of the

survivors who fled to Finland during the final Bolshevik as

sault. 48

Of particular interest are the statements of Petrichenko

himself in exile. We Kronstadt sailors, he said, to paraphrase

an article he wrote in 1925 , far from being counterrevolu

tionaries, are the very guardians of the revolution. During

the Civil War we fought with unstinting courage to defend

Petro grad and Russia against the Whites, and in March 1921

our devotion to the cause remained undiminished. Cut off

from the outside world, we could receive no aid from foreign

sources even if we had wanted it. We served as agents of no

external group : neither capitalists, Mensheviks, nor SR's.

Our revolt, rather, was a spontaneous effort to eliminate Bol

shevik oppression . We had no predetermined blueprint of

action, but felt our way as circumstances dictated. It is pos

sible that others may have drawn up their own plans for an

insurrection-indeed, this usually happens in such situations.

But this had nothing to do with the Provisional Revolutionary

Committee. Throughout the rising the initiative never passed

from our hands. And when we heard that right-wing ele

ments were seeking to exploit our revolt, we immediately

warned our supporters in an article called "Gentlemen or

Comrades."49

The reference here is to the lead editorial in the rebel

I zvestiia of March 6. It declared :

48 Quarton to Secretary of State, April 23, 1 92 1 , National Archives. 861 .00/86 1 9 . Cf. "Interv'iu s chlenami Vremennogo Revoliutsionnogo

Komiteta," Hoover Library. 49 Petrichenko, "0 prichinakh Kronshtadtskogo vosstaniia," Znam

ia Bar' by , December 1 925-J anuary 192 6, pp. 4-8.

113


You, comrades, are now celebrating a great and blood

less victory over the Communist dictatorship, but your ene

mies are celebrating with you. However, the motives of

your joy and of theirs are completely opposite. Whereas you

are inspired by the burning desire to restore the real power

of the soviets and by the noble hope of giving the worker

free labor and the peasant the right to dispose of his land

and the products of his labor, they are inspired by the hope

of restoring the tsarist whip and the generals' privileges.

Your interests are different, and therefore they are no

fellow-travelers of yours. You wanted the overthrow of

Communist rule for the purpose of peaceful reconstruction

and creative work; they wanted it for the enslavement of

the workers and peasants. You are seeking freedom; they

want to shackle you again. Look sharp. Do not let the

wolves in sheeps' clothing approach the helmsman's

bridge.50

IF, THE Secret Memorandum notwithstanding, the Russian

emigres neither organized nor inspired the rebellion, they

did not remain idle once it had broken out. The aims of the

insurgents, to be sure, were far removed from their own:

the sailors wanted a system of free soviets in which only

workers and peasants would be represented; no restoration

of the Constituent Assembly was envisioned, nor any free

doms or political rights for the landowners and middle

classes, who were to remain a dispossessed and outcast

minority. Nevertheless, the rising stirred new hope among

the expatriates. For Alexander Kerensky, the prime minister

of the ill-fated Provisional Government, it heralded the im

minent collapse of Bolshevism.51 Similarly, the Kadet leader

Miliukov, who had abandoned all faith in armed intervention,

welcomed the revolt as the beginning of an unconquerable

50 Pravda a Kronshtadte, p. 6 1 .

51 Golas Rossii, March 1 3 , 1 92 1 .

1 14


liberation movement by the mass of Russians themselves.

In an interview with the Paris correspondent of the New

York Times, he expressed optimism that the days of Lenin's

regime were numbered and called on the American govern

ment to send food to the rebels, though he made no appeal

for troops or weapons. His colleague Vinaver, however, was

more cautious. "It is impossible to say yet what chances of

success this particular movement has," he said. "The Bolshe

viks may be able to break it for the time being, but they will

not kill it ."52

The National Center, for its part, was jubilant. What had

happened in Kronstadt was precisely what the author of the

Secret Memorandum had forecast just a few weeks before,

even if it had happened sooner than expected. Now the

immediate task was to gather aid for the rebels. "The rising

in Kronstadt," states a confidential circular in the archives

of the Center, "has found a response in all the hearts of the

Russian exiles." We must send food and medicine at once, the

document continues, under the flag of the Red Cross; beyond

this, we must supply the insurgents with aircraft, motor

launches, fuel, and clothing to assist in spreading the revolt

to the mainland before the Bolsheviks can muster their

forces. 53 On March 6 Burtsev's Obshchee Delo, the semi-offi

cial organ of the Center, issued a passionate appeal to all

emigre groups to join forces in support of the rebellion lest

the final chance to save Russia be missed :

We are living through an hour that will not be re

peated. To remain an idle witness of events is out of the

question. We make an urgent appeal to all Russians

and through them to our allies-to afford the Kronstadt

revolutionists active material support. Let the insurgents

be given arms, let food be secured for Petrograd. The

52 New York Times, March 9, 1 92 1 .

53 Untitled manuscript, Columbia Russian Archive.

115


struggle against the Bolsheviks is our common cause! If

we chatter our way through these terrible days, if we still

cannot pull ourselves out of the quagmire of debates and

resolutions, woe to us, woe to Russia! If Europe, which has

already lost so many opportunities, loses this one as well,

then woe to her, woe to the entire worldp4

Although the emigres were too divided to be drawn into

any genuine cooperative effort, Burtsev's appeal did not .go

unheeded. The very next day, March 7, the Russian Union of

Commerce and Industry in Paris declared its intention to send

food and other supplies to Kronstadt, and communicated this

decision to its representatives in Helsingfors. At the same

time, it sent a radiogram to the Kronstadt Revolutionary

Committee ( the radio operator of the Petropavlovsk was able

to pick up messages transmitted through Reval) assuring

the rebels of full support. The radiogram declared that an

initial sum of two million Finnish marks had already been

pledged to aid Kronstadf in "the sacred cause of liberating

Russia," and, moreover, that the Provisional Government's

ambassador in Paris, V. A. Maklakov, had secured from the

French f0reign minister a promise of help in providing the

insurgents with food. On March 9 the Union of Commerce

and Industry established a special committee to organize

an effective supply line to Kronstadt and Petrograd. Other

anti-Bolshevik groups quickly followed suit, and the next

day a joint meeting was held to work out a common plan. 55

Meanwhile, a committee was formed by the National

Center branch in Helsingfors to channel supplies to the in

surgents. Professor Grimm, Wrangel's chief representative

in Finland, was elected chairman, and Professor Tseidler be-

54 Obshchee Dela, March 6, 1 92 1 .

55 R ul', March 9, 1 1 , and 1 2, 1 92 1 ; Paslednie Navasti, March 9 ,

1 92 1 . In 1 9 1 9, i t i s worth noting, the National Center i n Viborg had

raised money from the Union of Commerce and Industry to assist Yudenich's Northwest Army : A rkhiv russkai revaliutsii, I, 296.

116


came its busiest member, hurrying to Paris, the financial

center of the Russian emigration, to collect funds for the

enterprise. From N. Kh. Denisov, the head of the Union of

Commerce and Industry, he immediately obtained the sum

of 1 00,000 francs. After Tseidler returned to Finland, Count

V. N. Kokovtsov, who had served as Minister of Finance and

prime minister under Tsar Nicholas II, and was now chair

man of the International Bank in Paris, sent him 5,000 British

pounds, and the Russian-Asiatic Bank contributed 225 ,000

francs. Additional funds were donated by other Russian

banks, insurance companies, and financial concerns through

out Europe, and by the Russian Red Cross, which funneled

all collections to Tseidler, its representative in Finland. By

March 16 Kokovtsov was able to inform the Committee of

Russian Banks in Paris that deposits for Kronstadt already

exceeded 775,000 francs, or the two million Finnish marks

originally pledged to the rebels by the Union of Commerce

and Industry. 56

Apart from their own energetic fund-raising campaign,

the emigres sought the assistance of the Entente powers.

Representatives of the National Center telegraphed urgent

appeals to President Harding and to Herbert Hoover, the

American Secretary of Commerce, for the immediate dis

patch of food to the Kronstadt sailors. Similar requests came

from the Russian Parliamentary Committee in Paris and

from General Wrangel in Constantinople, who also sent a

message to Kozlovsky in Kronstadt, offering the assistance

of his Russian Army as soon as it could be mobilized. 51 A

56 R ul', March 1 8 , 1 92 1 ; G rimm to Kartashev, March 1 1 , 1 92 1 , Maklakov Arch ives, Series A, Packet 5 , No. 1 3 . One member of the

G rimm committee had ties with Bolis Savinkov's anti-Communist organization in Poland : G rimm to G iers, March 1 5 , 1 92 1 , Giers

Archives, File 8 8 .

51 General E. K. Miller, Paris, t o National Center i n Helsingfors,

March 1 4, 1 92 1 , Miller Archives, File 5M, No. 5 ; Obslzclzee Dela,

March 7, 1 92 1 ; R ut' , March 9, 1 92 1 ; Za Naradnae Dela, March 1 5 ,

1 92 1 .

1 1 7


rump conference of the deposed Constituent Assembly, from

its meeting place in Paris, wired Boris Bakhmetiev, the Pro

visional Government's ambassador in Washington, to try to

persuade the Americans to intercede. But the United States

government, loath to resume the interventionist policies of

the Civil War, turned a deaf ear to all such appeals. The

prospects of British aid were even dimmer, and apparently

little effort was made by the emigres to win support in Lon

don. At that very moment, indeed, a trade agreement be

tween Britain and Soviet Russia was just around the corner,

a reflection of the modus vivendi which had been in the

making since the conclusion of hostilities the previous year.

The best hope of foreign support came from France, the

most unyielding of the Allied nations in its opposition to the

Bolshevik regime. It is known from archival documents that

the National Center was in constant contact with the French

foreign ministry throughout the uprising. 58 Kerensky's journal

in Berlin reported that a French squadron had been ordered

to sail for the Baltic port of Reval with the mission of aiding

Kronstadt,59 but there is no evidence to corroborate this. Ac

cording to the Labourite Daily Herald, the insurgents received

financial aid from the French. "I can state definitely," wrote

the Herald's diplomatic correspondent, "that the French

Government is concerned in the Kronstadt affair, and that

a large sum of money for the use of the mutineers has been

sent by them to a certain professor [evidently Tseidler] in

Viborg. Supplies are also being sent under cover of the Red

Cross."60

It is possible, of course, that a portion of the large sums

raised so quickly by the Paris emigres and sent to Tseidler in

58 See the correspondence between General Mille r and the French

foreign ministry in the Miller Archives, File 5M, �o. 5.

59 Golas R ossii, March 1 3 , 1 92 1 . 60 Daily Herald, March 1 4, 1 92 1 .

1 1 8


Viborg came from the French government. ( The French, it

should be noted, continued to feed Wrangel's forces in Tur

key throughout this period. ) On the other hand, France was

already moving-although more slowly than Britain-to

wards an accommodation with the Soviet regime, and the

likelihood of their furnishing any appreciable aid to the Kron

stadters does not seem very great. According to the well

informed journal of Pavel Miliukov, the French refused to

interfere either politically or militarily in the crisis, but con

fined themselves to requesting Finland to allow food to pass

through its borders to feed the starving Kronstadt population.

This tallies with a detailed and extremely valuable report

from Harold Quarton, the American consul in Viborg, to

the Secretary of State in Washington ; while admitting that,

of all the foreign powers, the French were the most likely to

be involved, Quarton nevertheless concludes that little or no

aid had in fact been provided. 61

With regard to the involvement of the Red Cross, however,

the Bolsheviks ( and the Daily Herald ) were on solider

ground. For there can be no doubt that the National Center,

in its efforts to organize a supply line to Kronstadt, used the

Russian Red Cross as cover. This is admitted in the private

correspondence of the Center's agents on the Baltic. 62 On

the other hand, Soviet charges that the International Red

Cross and the American Red Cross were also implicated are

without foundation. Professor Tseidler hoped to use the food

stores of the International Red Cross in Stettin and Narva

to aid the rebels, and the Russian Red Cross in Paris tele-

61 Poslednie Novosti, March 9, 1 92 1 ; Za Narodnoe D elo, March

1 5, 1 92 1 ; Quarton to Secretary of State, April 23, 1 92 1 , National

Archives, 8 6 1 .00/ 86 1 9 : "Analysis of Foreign Assistance Rendered to

the Cronstadt Revolution."

62 General Kliuev to General Miller, March 1 4, 1 92 1 , Miller

Archives, File 5M, No. 5 ; G rimm to Giers, March 1 5, 1 92 1 , Giers

Archives, File 88 .

1 19


graphed Geneva for permission, but none was forthcoming.

Tseidler also asked the Baltic Commissioner of the American

Red Cross, Colonel Ryan by name, to release his stores in

Viborg. (The National Center no doubt felt it had a special

claim to this food, . for it had originally been purchased by

General Yudenich in 1919 to feed the po pula tion of Petro

grad once the Bolsheviks had been evicted, and later turned

over to the American Red Cross to aid Russian refugees in

the Baltic area. ) 63 Eager to help, Ryan went to Paris on

March 11 to consult with his superiors at the European

headquarters of the American Red Cross. The talks, how

ever, were without result. As Ryan told a reporter from

Obshchee Dela, two difficulties stood in the way : first,

his organization was barred by its constitution from lending

aid to any political or military group, and second, even if

this could somehow be circumvented, the Finnish government

would not allow any food to pass over its borders. 64 Despite

Bolshevik accusations of Finland's complicity with the

Whites, throughout the revolt, in the words of Harold Quar

ton, the Finns were "zealous in respecting the recently con

cluded peace treaty" ( of October 14, 1920 ) with the Soviet

government. The Finnish General Staff considered th e rising

premature and doomed to failure, and did not want to give

the Bolsheviks any excuse for military reprisals. At best,

as Tseidler himself noted afterwards, the Finns were will ing

63 Poslednie Novos!i, March 1 5, 192 1 ; Novaia Russkaia Zhizn',

March 1 2, 1 92 1 . See also the correspondence between National Center leaders i n Paris and Finland ( Kartashev, Kliuev, Miller, Grimm,

Tseidler) in Maklakov Archives, Series A, Packet 5, No. 13 , and in

Miller Archives, File 5M, No. 5.

64 Obshchee Delo, March 17 , 1 92 1 . After the rebellion, in a letter

to the president of the Russian Red Cross in Paris, Tseidler admitted

that no help had been received from either the British or American

Red Cross. Tseidler w rote that he would never forget the "triumphant

tone" of one American Red Cross official ( Hopkins by n ame ) , who

told him : "It's a good thing we didn't give you our flour." Tseidler

to B. E. Ivanitskii, March 20, 1 92 1 , Giers Archives, File 88 .

120


to allow medical supplies through as a humanitarian gesture,65

but nothing came of this offer.

In Paris, the National Center and its sympathizers were

frantic over these unanticipated roadblocks. Prince G. E.

Lvov, Kerensky's predecessor as prime minister of the Pro

visional Government, besought the Finnish ambassador to

reconsider, then tried again to get the French to intervene.

He also went to the headquarters of the American Red

Cross with a plea to release the stores in Viborg, but all of

his efforts were unavailing. 66 Meanwhile, time was running

out. The food situation in Kronstadt was growing desperate

so desperate that on March 1 3 Petrichenko wired Professor

Grimm and authorized him to petition Finland and other

countries for assistance. According to Quarton, the Finnish

General Staff was of the opinion ( rightly, as events were to

show) that the rebels' food supply could not last beyond the

end of the month . Quarton nevertheless advised Washington

against any American attempt to send supplies by sledge for

fear that they might be intercepted. 67 The United States Com

missioner in Berlin was of the same opinion, having been

convinced by certain emigres there that any intervention

could only help Lenin out of his difficulties by uniting Russia

against a new foreign invasion ; hence, to grant the requests of

the Paris exiles for assistance, he concluded, would, even on

philanthropic grounds, be "premature and subject to mis

construction."68 This message , incidentally, was forwarded

by the Secretary of State to the national headquarters of the

American Red Cross in Washington and perhaps affected

65 Quarton to Secretary of State, March 1 1 , 1 92 1 , National Ar

chives, 86 1 .00/83 1 9 ; Charge in Helsingfors to Secretary of State ,

April 22, 1 9 2 1 , ibid., 8 6 1 .00/862 8 ; Tseidler, 0 snabzhellii Peterburga.

66 Poslednie Novosti, March 8, 1 92 1 ; R ul', March 1 0, 1 92 1 ;

Obshchee Delo, March 1 7, 1 92 1 .

67 Petrichenko t o G rimm, March 1 3 , 1 92 1 , G rimm Archives ;

Quarton t o Secretary o f State, March 1 1 , National Archives, 8 6 1 .001

8 3 1 8 .

68 Dresel to Secretary of State, March 1 4, 192 1 , ibid., 86 1 .00/8323.

12 1


the organization's decision not to intervene. "The Red Cross,"

wrote its national secretary a few weeks after the revolt,

"gave no assistance of any kind whatever to the rebels in

Kronstadt, nor did it attempt to do so. "69

The Russian Red Cross, on the other hand, did its utmost

to get aid to the insurgents until the clock ran out. As head

of its branch in Finland, Tseidler continued to gather money

from sympathizers across the continent, but his chief con

cern now was to find some way to deliver the supplies to the

besieged sailors. On March 1 6, as the rebellion approached

its final act, Baron P. V. Vilken, an associate of Tseidler

and Grimm, made his way across the ice to Kronstadt in the

guise of a Russian -Red Cross representative. Vilken, a for

mer captain in the Imperial Navy, had served as commander

of the Sevastopo[ and as head of the minelayer division of the

Baltic Fleet. The Bolsheviks rightly call him a White agent,

though he did not, as they claim, use the cover of the Amer

ican or International Red Cross. His "secret mission," as

Quarton termed it, was to offer the Provisional Revolutionary

Committee food and medicine as soon as a supply route

could be arranged.70 In the past, such an approach would

doubtless have met with a curt rebuff. But now the sailors

were desperately short of food, and their medical supplies

were completely exhausted. Any doubts about Vilken's mo

tives ( his officer background was known to the rebel leaders )

were brushed aside, and the Revolutionary Committee ac

cepted his offer. The Red Cross, explained Petrichenko, was

"a philanthropic and not a political organization. "71

69 National Secretary, American Red Cross, to Secretary of State,

May 2 1 , 1 92 1 , ibid., 8 6 1 .00/8572. A second letter ( M ay 24, 8 6 1 .00/

8627 ) noted that aid had been supplied only to the Kronstadt refugees

in Finland.

; 0 Krasnyi A rkhiv, 1 927, No. 6 , p. 9 3 ; Quarton to Secretary of

State, April 23, 1 92 1 , National Archives, 8 6 1 .00/86 1 9 ; Krasnaia

Gazeta, March 20, 1 92 1 ; Pukhov, Kronshtadtskii miatezh, p. 59.

7 1 Znalllia Bor'by, December 1 925-January 1 926, p. 8 .

122


But, as Petrichenko pointed out and the Communists

themselves acknowledged, no outside aid ever reached the

insurgents. 72 A few tons of flour and lard were brought over

on sledges by Finnish smugglers, but even this inadequate

consignment arrived too late and fell into Bolshevik hands.73

Thus the enormous efforts of the Kadet emigres to provisio� Kronstadt ended in total failure. No Red Cross food stores

were ever released ; access through Finland remained blocked ;

and attempts to obtain icebreakers and transport ships came

to nothing. The final blow fell on March 16 with the signing

of the Angle-Soviet trade agreement, a "stab in the back,"

to quote Obshchee Dela' s bitter reaction,74 which effectively

discouraged Finland and other countries from reviewing

their policy of neutrality. Nothing, in short, had been done

to implement the Secret Memorandum, and the warnings of

its author were fully borne out. Perhaps the necessary prepa

rations would have been made had the revolt not broken out

so early and caught the emigres off balance. In any case, the

only supplies which the rebels were destined to receive

reached them in Finnish refugee camps after their insurrec

tion had been suppressed.

DESPITE Burtsev's pleas for unity in the "common cause"

of dislodging the Bolsheviks from power, the Russian ex

patriates remained hopelessly divided. Throughout the re

bellion, the Mensheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries, and the

liberals of the National Center went their own separate ways ;

there was no cooperation among them, no pooling of ener

gies and resources. The SR's, however, made their own

plans-unsuccessful in the end-to supply the rebels.

The events in Kronstadt brought new life and vigor to the

72 See Jane Degras, ed. , The Communist In ternational, 1919-1943,

3 vols. , London, 1 956- 1 965, 1, 2 1 3 - 1 5 .

73 Charge in Helsingfors t o Secretary o f State, April 2 2 , 1 92 1 ,

National Archives, 86 1 .00/ 862 8 .

74 ObsJzcJzee De/a, March 1 8 , 1 92 1 .

123


SR organization in exile. In Paris, Berlin, and Prague, the

most renowned of the party's leaders-Alexander Kerensky,

head of the Provisional Government, and Victor Chernov,

chairman of the short-lived Constituent Assembly-threw

themselves into the task of raising funds to purchase food

stuffs and other supplies needed to keep the insurrection

alive. From private correspondence intercepted by Bolshevik

intelligence agents and subsequently published by the Soviet

government, we know that they were able to collect substan

tial amounts of money. Two letters from V. M. Zenzinov in

Prague to a member of the SR Administrative Center in

Paris ( dated March 8 and 13 ) mention sums in excess of

100,000 French francs, plus $25 ,000 sent from New York

by Boris Bakhmetiev, Kerensky's ambassador to the United

States. The letters also indicate that some 50,000 poods of

flour had been collected in Amsterdam for shipment to Kron

stadt. 75

All aid was to be channeled through Victor Chernov in the

Baltic city of Reval, who played a role for the SR's analogous

to that of Tseidler and Grimm for the Kadet National Cen

ter. During the first week of the rising, Chernov sent the fol

lowing radiogram to the Provisional Revolutionary Commit

tee :

The chairman of the Constituent Assembly, Victor Cher

nov, sends his fraternal greetings to the heroic comrade

sailors, Red Army men, and workers, who for the third

time since 1905 are throwing off the yoke of tyranny. He

offers to aid with men and to provision Kronstadt through

the Russian cooperatives abroad. Inform us what and

how much is needed. I am prepared to come in person

and give my energies and authority to the service of the

people's revolution. I have faith in the final victory of the

laboring masses. Hail to the first to raise the banner of

75 Rabota eserov zagranitsei, Moscow, 1922, pp. 66-70.

124


the people's liberation! Down with despotism from the

left and the rightP6

The Revolutionary Committee held a special meeting to

consider the offer. Only Valk voted in favor, while Perepel

kin voted to reject it out of hand; the rest followed Petri

chenko and Kilgast, who argued that the best course was to

decline for the time being.7 7 As a result, Chernov received

the following reply : "The Provisional Revolutionary Com

mittee of Kronstadt expresses to all our brothers abroad its

deep gratitude for their sympathy. The Provisional Revolu

tionary Committee is thankful for Chernov's offer, but it

declines for the moment, until further developments become

clarified. Meanwhile, everything will be taken into consid

eration."78 The tone of the reply was not unfriendly. Although

the sailors, expecting their revolt to spread to the mainland,

did not think outside aid necessary, neither did they want

to shut the door if it should be needed later. In the end,

however, no SR help was requested and none was ever to

reach Kronstadt.

I n contrast to the Kadets and SR's, the Mensheviks in

exile held aloof from anti-Bolshevik conspiracies and made

no attempt to aid the rebels. Ever since Lenin and his fol

lowers seized power, the Mensheviks had acted as a legal

opposition party, seeking to win a share of political author

ity through free and unhampered elections to the soviets.

During the Civil War, regarding the Whites as a greater evil

than the Bolsheviks, they opposed armed insurrection against

the regime and threatened to expel any member who joined

the counterrevolution. (I van Maisky, the future Soviet diplo

mat, was ejected from the party after entering the militantly

anti-Bolshevik SR government in Samara. ) As late as 1 92 1 ,

76 R evoliutsionnaia Rossiia, 1 92 1 , No. 8 , pp. 3 -4; Berkman, The

Kronstadt Rebellion, p. 16 .

77 Pravda, April 7, 1 92 1 .

7 8 R evoliutsionnaia R ossiia, 1 92 1 , No. 8, pp. 3 -4.

125


for all their denunciations of Bolshevik despotism and terror,

the Mensheviks clung to the belief that armed struggle against

Lenin's government could only benefit the counterrevolution

aries; and Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik [The Socialist Courier],

the principal Menshevik organ abroad, while sympathizing

with the Kronstadt sailors in their opposition to one-party

dictatorship and the policies of War Communism, dissociated

itself from the interventionist efforts of the Kadets and SR's.

Our aim, the journal declared, is to combat Bolshevism not

with guns but with the irresistible pressure of the working

masses. 79

IN SUMMARY, the Russians in exile ( with the partial excep

tion of the Mensheviks) rejoiced at the uprising and sought to

assist the insurgents by every possible means. To this extent

the Soviet charges against them are justified. But it is not true

that the emigres had engineered the rebellion. On the con

trary, for all the intrigues in P aris and Helsingfors, the Kron

stadt uprising was a spontaneous and self-contained move

ment from beginning to end. What the evidence shows is

not that the revolt was the outcome of a conspiracy but that

an incipient plot apparently existed within Russian circles

abroad, and that the plotters, while sharing the enmity of the

sailors towards the existing regime, played no role in the

actual rising. The National Center anticipated the outbreak

and laid plans to help organize it and, with French assistance,

to supply its participants with food, medicine, troops, and

military equipment. The Center's ultimate objective was to

assume control of the rebellion and make Kronstadt the

springboard of a new intervention to oust the Bolsheviks

from power. As it turned out, however, there was no time

to put these plans into effect. The eruption occurred too

soon, several weeks before the basic conditions of the plot

the melting of the ice, the creation of a supply line, the se-

79 Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik, March 1 8 , 1 92 1 , pp. 1 -3 .

126

KRONST AD T & THE RUSSIAN EMIGRATION

curing of French support, and the transportation of Wrangel's

scattered army to a nearby staging area-could be fulfilled.

That the Kadets and SR's should attempt to turn the re

volt to their own advantage is hardly surprising. But to the

end it was the sailors and their Revolutionary Committee who

called the tune . Not until the situation became desperate did

they appeal for outside help, for they confidently expected

that their own example would set off a mass revolt on the

mainland. N or did they ever receive any of the aid with

which the emigres were endeavoring to furnish them, and,

apart from Baron Vilken's visit on March 1 6, scarcely any

direct contact with their would-be supporters occurred dur

ing the course of the uprising. The available evidence, in

cidentally, reveals no links of any sort between the exiles

and the former tsarist officers at Kronstadt, the most logical

source of collaboration in any White conspiracy.

What can be shown, however, is that some sort of agree

ment was concluded between the rebels and the emigres after

the rising had been crushed and its leaders had fled to Fin

land. In May 1 92 1 Petrichenko and several of his fellow

refugees at the Fort Ino camp decided to volunteer their

services to General Wrangel. At the end of the month they

wrote to Professor Grimm, Wrangel's representative in He1-

singfors, and offered to join forces in a new campaign to

unseat the Bolsheviks and restore "the gains of the March

1 9 1 7 Revolution." The sailors put forward a six-point pro

gram as the basis for any common venture : ( 1 ) all land to

the peasants, ( 2 ) free trade unions for the workers, ( 3 )

full independence for the border states, ( 4 ) freedom of action

for the Kronstadt fugitives, ( 5 ) the removal of shoulder

epaulettes from all military uniforms, and ( 6 ) the retention

of their slogan "all power to the soviets but not the parties."

Surprisingly, however, the slogan was to be retained only as

a "convenient political maneuver" until the Communists had

been overthrown. Once victory was in hand, the slogan

127


would be shelved and a temporary military dictatorship in

stalled to prevent anarchy from engulfing the country. This

last point, no doubt, was intended as a sop for Wrangel.

The sailors, at any rate, insisted that in due course the Rus

sian people must be "free to decide for themselves what kind

of government they want. "80

Grimm immediately agreed to these terms, and Wrangel

himself sent a favorable reply several weeks later. The pact,

moreover, appears to have been implemented. For during

the summer of 1 92 1 , if reports of the Soviet secret police are

to be credited, Petrichenko, in collaboration with Grimm and

Baron Vilken, recruited a group of refugee sailors and

smuggled them into Petro grad, which, at an appropriate

time, they were to help seize as a new bridgehead against the

Communists. Once inside the city, the sailors worked under

the direction of the Petro grad Fighting Organization, an un

derground group affiliated with the National Center and

headed by V. N. Tagantsev, a former professor of geography

at Petrograd University. Eventually, it seems, the forces of

General Wrangel were to come into play, but before this

could happen the Fighting Organization was uncovered and

liquidated. 81

The refugees, however, did not lose heart. In June 1 92 1

the Congress of National Union, summoned by the National

Center to unite like-minded emigres in an anti-Bolshevik

crusade, received a message from a group of Kronstadters in

80 Petrichenko et al. to G rimm, Fort Ino, May 3 1 , 1 92 1 , and to Wrangel, M ay 3 1 , 1 92 1 , G rimm Archives and Giers Archives, File

8 8 . 81 Iz istorU Vserossiiskoi chrezvychainoi komissii, 1 9 1 7-1921 gg.:

sbornik dokwnentov, Moscow, 1 958, pp. 43 3-36, 445-58; "0 ras

skrytom v Petro grade zagovorov protiv Sovetskoi vlasti," Vecheka

Presidium, August 29, 1 92 1 , Columbia Russian Archive. Tagantsev

was executed in August 1 92 1 . On the Petrograd Fighting Organiza

tion see also Vardin, Revoliutsiia i men'shevizm , pp. 1 4 1 -54; Pukhov,

Kronshtadtskii miatezh, pp. 1 1 7- 1 8 ; Krasnaia Letopis', 1 93 1 , No. 3 ,

pp. 1 8- 1 9 ; and Voprosy IstorU, 1 96 8 , No. 1 , pp. 1 3 3-36.

128


Finland warmly endorsing their program. 82 Furthermore, in

the archives of the National Center there is a confidential

document of October 30, 1 92 1 , signed by Petrichenko and

Yakovenko ( as chairman and deputy chairman of the Pro

visional Revolutionary Committee ) , which authorizes one

V sevolod Nikolaevich Skosyrev to join the Russian National

Committee in Paris as a representative of the refugee,s for

"the coordination of active work with other organizations

standing on a platform of armed struggle against the Com

munists ."83

None of this, of course, proves that there were any ties

between the Center and the Revolutionary Committee either

before or during the revolt. It would seem, rather, that the

mutual experience of bitterness and defeat, and a common

determination to overthrow the Soviet regime, led them to

join hands . in the aftermath. The Bolsheviks persisted in

denying the spontaneous nature of the rebellion, blaming it

on a whole array of Russian opposition groups-ranging

from monarchists on the Right to anarchists on the Left-in

cooperation with the Allied espionage services. But no con

vincing proof has even been put forward to substantiate

these charges. Lenin himself admitted as much when he told

the Tenth Party Congress on March 1 5 that in Kronstadt

"they do not want the White Guards, and they do not want

our power either."84 Although he insisted that the emigres

had an important role in the affair, Lenin recognized that

the rising was not a mere repetition of the White movements

of the Civil War. He looked upon it, rather, as a sign of the

deep gulf which had come to divide his party from the

Russian people. If the White Guards were involved, he said,

"at the same time the movement amounts to a petty bour

geois counterrevolution, to petty bourgeois anarchistic spon-

82 Obshchee Dela, June 1 3 , 1 92 ! .

83 "Mandat," October 30, 1 92 1 , Columbia Russian Archive. 84 Desiatyi s"ezd R KP( b ) , p. 4 1 4.

129


taneity." By this he meant that, at bottom, the revolt reflected

the discontent of the Russian peasantry, the small proprietors

who had no use for the state and its controls but · wanted to

be left alone to use their land as they saw fit. "Without

doubt," Lenin added, "this petty bourgeois counterrevolution

is more dangerous than Denikin, Yudenich, and Ko1chak

put together. For we are dealing with a country in which

peasant property has come to ruin, besides which the demo

bilization of the army has set loose vast numbers of poten

tially mutinous elements. "85

His colleague Bukharin took a similar view. Far more

serious than Kronstadt, he told the Tenth Congress, was the

"petty bourgeois infection" which had spread from the peas

antry to a segment of the working class. This, he said, was

a much greater hazard than the fact that some general or

other had raised a military mutiny at Kronstadt. A few

months later Bukharin returned to the same theme. "The

documents which have since been brought to light," he told

the Third Com intern Congress in July 1 92 1 , "show clearly

that the affair was instigated by purely White Guard centers,

but at the same time the Kronstadt mutiny was a petty bour

geois rebellion against the socialist system of economic com

pulsion. "86

By these remarks, Lenin and Bukharin, for all the invec

tive of the official propaganda machine, succeeded in laying

bare the true essence of the Kronstadt rebellion. The sailors'

mutiny had less to do with White conspiracies than with the

spontaneous peasant revolts and working-class unrest then

sweeping the country. Taken together, these movements rep

resented a mass protest against the Bolshevik dictatorship

and its obsolete program of War Communism. It was a pro

test of the people against the government, and the rising at

Kronstadt was its most eloquent and dramatic expression.

85 Ibid. , pp. 3 3-34. 86 Ibid., pp. 2 24-25 ; N. Bukharin, The New Policies of Soviet Rus

sia, Chicago, 1 92 1 , p. 56.

130

4. First Assault

The Bolsheviks, faced with a staggering domestic CrISIS,

were determined to end the revolt as quickly as possible.

Their very existence as a government seemed at stake. For

one thing, the title of "Provisional Revolutionary Commit

tee," adopted by the rebel leaders on March 2, was itself a

provocation and a challenge. But even more menacing was

the initial demand of the Petropav[ovsk resolution. By ap

pealing for new elections to the soviets, "in view of the fact

that the present soviets do not express the will of the workers

and peasants," the insurgents in effect were questioning the

legitimacy of Bolshevik rule. The theme was sounded again

on March 3 in the first number of the Kronstadt I zvestiia.

The Communist party, declared the lead editorial, had thor

oughly alienated itself from the people. Only the common

efforts of the toiling masses, operating through freely elected

soviets, could rescue the nation from further misery and op

pression. 1 Given the recent disturbances in Moscow and

Petrograd, and the peasant revolts still raging along the

peripheries, such pronouncements, in the eyes of the authori

ties, carried subversive overtones. Unless quick action were

taken, Kronstadt, it was feared, might trigger a general up

heaval .

Further cause for alarm was provided by the revival of

hostile maneuvers among the Russians who had emigrated.

After nearly three years of Civil War, the fear of counter

revolutionary conspiracies had become deeply ingrained in

the Soviet leadership. Fed by an endless stream of rumors,

a "White Scare" ( comparable to "Red Scare" hysteria in the

West ) gripped the ranks of the party. To many Bolsheviks

especially during the first days of the rebellion when the

situation was confused and reliable information hard to come

by-Kronstadt smacked unmistakably of an anti-Soviet plot .

1 Pravda 0 Kronshtadte, p. 45.

13 1

FIRST ASSAULT

After a long series of White generals-Kornilov, Krasnov,

Miller, Yudenich, Kolchak, Denikin, Wrangel-backed by

the Entente and the Russian opposition, General Kozlovsky

seemed to fit the familiar pattern. When news of the revolt

first reached Petro grad, Zinoviev's brother-in-law awakened

Victor Serge at the Hotel Astoria. "Kronstadt is in the hands

of the Whites," he said in an agitated voice. "We are all un

der orders."2

Not that the Bolsheviks had any inkling of the National

Center's Secret Memorandum, or they would surely have

brought it to light in their propaganda war against the in

surgents. Yet they did know that plans were afoot to pro

vision Kronstadt and to send troops and equipment to bolster

the rebellion. Soviet agents, as we have seen, intercepted the

correspondence of the SR leaders. They also knew of Cher

nov's offer to aid the insurgents. Furthermore, the money

raising campaign of the Kadets and Octobrists was openly

reported in the emigre press, and the activities of Tseidler

and Grimm in Finland did not go unnoticed. 3 That the exiles

in Paris, Berlin, and Helsingfors were alive with new hope

and excitement undoubtedly heightened the sense of urgency

in Moscow and Petrograd and strengthened the government's

resolve to liquidate the revolt promptly and decisively.

It would seem, then, that Soviet charges of a counterrevolu

tionary plot were not mere fabrications designed solely as

propaganda against the rebels, but rather that propaganda

was m ingled with genuine anxiety at the prospect of a · White

resurgence. In any event, the Bolsheviks sought in every way

to discredit Kronstadt in the eyes of the people. They were

particularly worried by the effect of the rising on the army.

If Soviet troops should be needed to suppress the mutiny,

it had to be depicted as a dangerous counterrevolutionary

movement. Thus Kozlovsky was linked to the White generals

2 Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, p. 1 24.

3 lzvestiia Petrogradskogo Soveta, March 1 6, 1 92 1 .

132

FIRST ASSAULT

of the Civil War and labeled a "new Yudenich," menacing

Petrograd from its Baltic approaches. 4 And a special circular

to the Red Army charged the rebels with attempting to dis

rupt the peace negotiations with the Poles at Riga; but for

Kronstadt, the soldiers were told, they might have been

demobilized and allowed to return to their homes. 5

The rising, moreover, was said to be "part of a great plan

to provoke trouble within Soviet Russia to impair its inter

national position."6 The Whites were conspiring not only

to bring about a renewed Polish intervention but to sabotage

the new detente with the West. Specifically, they wanted to

prevent any shift in American policy towards an accommo

dation with the Soviets. The new Republican president

( Harding) , according to the Bolshevik press, was disposed

to resume commercial relations with Russia, a far-fetched

belief which may have been encouraged by an enterprising

American visitor, W. B. Vanderlip, whom Lenin took to be

a wealthy businessman with influential connections in Wash

ington. Similarly, Lev Kamenev warned the Tenth Party

Congress that the counterrevolutionaries were bent on up

setting the imminent trade agreement with the British. 7 As

Leonid Krasin, the Soviet emissary in London, put it, "cer

tain sinister interests are working, at any rate, for a post

ponement, possibly a rupture, of the . negotiations." Krasin

was confident, however, that Kronstadt would meet the same

fate as all previous White Guard plots : "When you remember

the troubles the Soviet Government has faced successfully

during the past three years, this Kronstadt affair is insignifi

cant. And it will be dealt with in the usual m anner."8

Of greater concern to the Bolsheviks was the determina-

4 Petrogradskaia Pravda, March 4, 1 92 1 .

5 "Prikaz voiskam. Krasnoi Armii Moskovskogo garnizona," No.

226, March 3 , 1 92 1 , Maklakov Archives, Series B, Packet 5 , No. 5. 6 Pravda 0 Kronshtadte, p . 7 1 .

7 Desiatyi s"ezd RKP ( b ) , p . 456.

8 Daily Herald, March 7, 192 1 .

133

FIRST ASSAULT

tion of the emigres to gain access to Kronstadt and use it as

a base for a landing on the mainland. This would have meant

nothing less than a resumption of the Civil \-Var, something

which, in view of the general exhaustion of the country, the

Soviet regime might not have been able to survive. What the

authorities feared, in other words, was not so much the re

bellion itself as what it might lead to. The real danger, Lenin

told the Tenth Party Congress at its opening session, was

that Kronstadt might serve as "a step, a ladder, a bridge" for

a White restoration. 9 It was in this sense, primarily, that Lenin

and his associates regarded the sailors as counterrevolution

aries. "Show us who your supporters are," they seemed to

say� "and we shall tell you who you are ." They spoke of the

rebels themselves not as vicious enemies of the people but

as wayward brothers, as much to be pitied as condemned.

"We waited as long as possible," said Trotsky at a parade

for the troops who had crushed the revolt, "for our blind

sailor comrades to see with their own eyes where the mutiny

led." And Bukharin addressed the Third Com intern Con

gress in a similar vein : "Who says the Kronstadt rising was

White? No. For the sake of the idea, for the sake of our task,

we were forced to suppress the revolt of our erring brothers.

We cannot look upon the Kronstadt sailors as our enemies.

We love them as our true brothers, our own flesh and

blood."lO

For foreign Communists in Russia, such as Victor Serge

and Andre Morizet, staten-.ents like these were extremely

disturbing. Having been led to believe that Kronstadt was

merely a repetition of the anti-Bolshevik movements of the

Civil War, they were "astonished and troubled" to find

among the Soviet leaders none of the malice which had been

9 Desiatyi s"ezd RKP ( b ) , p. 34. 10 Isaac Deutscher, Th e Prophet A rmed, New York, 1 954, p. 5 1 4 ;

Raphael R . Abramovitch, The SOl'iet R evolution, 1917-1939, New

York, 1 962, p. 203 . Cf. Andre Morizet, Chez Lhzine et Trotski,

Moscou 1921, Paris, 1 922, pp. 78-84.

134

FIRST ASSAULT

felt for the White legions and their collabo rators ; their talk,

rather, was punctuated by "sympathetic reticences" which

to the visitors betrayed the party's troubled conscience. Yet

these outsiders recognized the dilemma of their Bolshevik

corrrades : the dilemma of holding power while at the same

time preserving their revolutionary ideals. After consider

able soul-searching, and with "unutterable anguish, " Serge

declared himself on the side of the Comm unists against the

insurrection, even though Kronstadt, he said, had right on

its side-even though the party, swollen by the influx of

power- seekers, inspired little confidence among the people.

For if the Bolshevik dictatorship should fall, he reasoned,

it was only a short step to chaos, to a general peas ant revolt,

a Pugachevshclzina as of old, the m assacre o f the Commu

nists, the return of the emigres with their sterile and out

moded policies, and in the end another dictatorship, this time

antiproletarian rather than antibourgeois . Still, Serge vowed

personally not to take up anns again st the famished workers

and sailors who, he said, h ad been pushed to the limits of

their e ndurance .l1

IN THE END, arm s were indeed employed to subdue the

rebels. But was force really necessary? How seriously did

the Bolsheviks try to reach a peaceful settlement before

bringing their guns into action? By their own account, every

effort was m ade to avoid bloodshed, but in fact they might

have done much more. During the first week of the rebellion,

it is true, numerous appeals were m ade to the insu rgents to

listen to reason ; on March 1 , as we know, both Kalinin and

Kuzn:in went to Kronstadt as peacemakers and spoke at the

open-air meeting in Anchor Squ are, and Kuzmin spoke at

the House of Education the next day. Yet they offered no

concessions, such as h ad been granted, for example, to the

striking workers in Petrograd. Although the s ituation pl ainly

11 Serge , A1enzoirs of a RNo/lIliol/ary , pp. 1 2 6-29.

1 35

FIRST ASSAULT

called for tact and conciliation, these were conspicuously

absent in the speeches of the two officials. Their manner was

defiant, belligerent, unyielding, and their tone was so threat

ening that it could only provoke the excitable sailors still

further. From the start, the attitude of the authorities was

not one of serious negotiation but of delivering an ultima

tum : either come to your senses or suffer the consequences.

This was unfortunate, indeed tragic, for the chances were

good that the insurgents would have responded to a more

sympathetic and flexible approach. But the Bolsheviks, faced

with one of the gravest crises in their history, were in no

mood for compromise. Their nerves were badly frayed. They

feared the Poles, the emigres, the Entente, and the possibility

that Kronstadt might become the spearhead of a new inter

ventionist campaign; they feared the spread of the revolt to

the mainland, already seething with discontent and ablaze in

several locations with peasant uprisings ; they feared the loss

of political power, followed by anarchy and then a White

restoration. In such circumstances, negotiation with the

rebels seemed too risky. Any hesitation, any sign of weakness

in the face of defiance and subversion, might precipitate the

general collapse of their authority. After seizing power and

holding it through three years of bloody conflict, were they

now to sacrifice everything to a mutiny of hotheaded and

undisciplined sailors? Could they afford to play a game of

waiting and hope for the revolt to peter out by itself? Time

was not on their side. Before very long the thaw would come.

We learn from the rebel /zvestiia of March 15 that the snow

on the city streets in Kronstadt was already beginning to turn

to slush.12 In a matter of weeks the ice in the Gulf of Finland

would melt, making an infantry assault on the fortress im

possible. The warships frozen in Kronstadt harbor would be

freed for action. What is more, even if Finland persisted in

barring transit across its borders, supplies and reinforcements

12 Pravda 0 Kronshtadte, p . 1 62.

136

FIRST ASSAULT

could then come into Kronstadt by sea. To prevent all this

from happening, the Bolsheviks realized they would have to

act quickly. What government would long tolerate a mutinous

navy at its most strategic base, a base which its enemies

coveted as a stepping-stone for a new invasion? "We waited

as long as possible," said Trotsky shortly after the rebellion

was suppressed, "but we were confronted by the danger that

the ice would melt away and we were compelled to carry

out . . . the attack."13

AMONG the chief concerns of the authorities, two were per

haps the most immediate : that the rebellion might spread to

the mainland, and that it might touch off mutinies in other

units of the army and navy. Both of these fears were height

ened by events in Oranienbaum on March 2. That afternoon

emissaries from Kronstadt made their way across the ice

with copies of the Petropavlovsk resolution, which they dis

tributed in Petro grad and a few neighboring towns. At

Oranienbaum the rank and file of the First Naval Air Squad

ron held a meeting at their club, unanimously endorsed the

resolution, and, following Kronstadt's example, proceeded

to elect their own Revolutionary Committee. Soon after this

they met again in a nearby hangar and chose a three-man

delegation to cross the ice and establish direct contact with

the Kronstadters. In the middle of the night-apparently

after the delegates from the Air Squadron arrived with their

offer to join the movement-the Kronstadt Revolutionary

Committee sent a party of 250 men to Oranienbaum, but

they were met by machine-gun fire and forced to withdraw.

The three envoys of the Air Squadron were arrested by the

Cheka while attempting to return to their base. Meanwhile,

the commissar of the Oranienbaum garrison, having learned

of the incipient mutiny, called Zinoviev's Defense Committee

with an urgent request for reinforcements. All Communists

13 Deutscher, The Prophet A rmed, p. 5 1 4.

137

FIRST ASSAULT

at Oranienbaum were issued arms and given extra rations to

allay any discontent which they themselves may have felt

over the food situation. At 5 A.M. on March 3 an armored

train with a detachment of kursanty and three batteries of

light artillery arrived from Petrograd. The barracks of the

Air Squadron were quickly surrounded and their occupants

arrested. A few hours later, after intensive questioning, 45

men were taken out and shot, among them the chief of the

Division of Red Naval Aviators and the chairman and secre

tary of the newly formed Revolutionary Committee.14

The suppression of the Oranienbaum mutiny came as the

first major setback to the Kronstadt leaders. Confident that

their revolt would spread to the mainland, thereby forcing

the Bolsheviks to yield to their demands, they had refused

to take the offensive, sending only a small force to Oranien

baum with disastrous results. (The Oranienbaum rebels, for

their part, displayed the same naive mentality, making no

effort to arm themselves and to seize control of their own

base. ) Yet, if the attitude of the Air Squadron was any in

dication, Oranienbaum-as Kozlovsky and his colleagues in

sisted-could probably have been taken with slight resist

ance. Then the rebels could have m arched on Petrograd,

whose inhabitants might well have been encouraged to rise

against the government. But all advice of this kind was stub

bornly rejected. The sailors felt far more secure on their

island bastion than off somewhere on the mainland in the

unaccustomed role of foot soldiers. Fearing that their num

bers were insufficient for an offensive, they preferred to shut

themselves in their seemingly impregnable fortress, bristling

with guns on every side, and wait until the government

agreed to terms.

Henceforward every appeal that they should assume the

initiative fell on deaf ears. When the "military specialists"

14 Pravda 0 Kronshtadte, pp. 92-94; Petrichenko, Pravda 0 Kron

shtadtskikh sobyTiiakh, pp. 8-9.

138

FIRST ASSAULT

proposed cutting the ice around Kotlin Island with artillery

fire in order to make it invulnerable to an infantry attack,

the Revolutionary Committee responded that there were not

enough spare shells to do the job and that, in any case, the

water would only freeze again in a very short time. 15 Thus,

for the duration of the rising, no attempt was made to moat

the fortress or to free the icebound warships, although out

siders assumed that such action must have been taken.16

Similarly, when the specialists recommended barricading the

streets in the eastern part of the city near the vulnerable

Petro grad Gate ( a foresighted suggestion, as it turned out ) ,

the Revolutionary Committee insisted that it lacked the men

and materials for the task, though plenty of both were actu

ally on hand. Kozlovsky later explained that the sailors re

fused to cooperate because of their congenital mistrust of

officers and of higher authority in general. Scorning their

obstinacy and lack of discipline, he complained that the re

volt ought not to have occurred till the thaw had melted the

ice of the Finnish Gulf. It was the impatience of the sailors

to throw off the Communist yoke, he said, which precipitated

the premature outbreak.17

Meanwhile, the rebellion had had little success in igniting

the mainland. In only a few places-notably Oranienbaum,

Peterhof, and Petrograd-did dissident movements emerge

that were willing to espouse the rebel cause . But the Com-

15 Report of Lieutenj:j.nt R. Kelley, in Quarton to Secretary of State, April 2 3 , 1 92 1 , National Archives, 86 1 .00/86 1 9. Stories in the

emigre press (e.g. R ut', March 8, 1 92 1 ) that the Ermak was used by

the rebels to break a path to Oranienbaum were erroneous. The vessel was in Petrograd, having gone there for fuel only a day before the outbreak of the rebellion.

16 See, for example, Quarton to Secretary of State, M arch 9, 1 92 1 ,

ibid., 86 1 .00/8296: "Ice i s thickly frozen o n both shores but rev

olutionists have probably moated themselves and are protected by open water."

17 Novaia Rllsskaia Zhizn', March 19, 1 92 1 ; London Times, March 2 1 , 1 92 1 ; Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik, April 5, 1 92 1 , pp. 5-6.

139

FIRST ASSAVLT

munists throughout the area had been put on the alert for

seditious activity, and in every case where it occurred it was

promptly snuffed out. In Petro grad, for instance, a delega

tion of Kronstadt sailors tried to win over the crew of the

icebreaker Truvor (some sources say it was the Ermak ),

apparently with the aim of freeing the Sevastopol and Petro

pavlovsk and moating Kotlin Island against an infantry in

vasion, and perhaps too of opening a supply channel to the

West. But Bolshevik troops were immediately dispatched to

the ship, and the Kronstadters and their sympathizers were

taken into custody. 18 Otherwise Kronstadt did little to spread

the revolt. Of the 200 emissaries sent to distribute the Petro

pavlovsk resolution in the towns of Petrograd province, only

a handful avoided capture ; sailors bearing leaflets were inter

cepted as far south as Dno, a railway junction on the line

from Petrograd to Vitebsk. The insurgents also tried using the

telephone to explain their position to Petro grad and Krasnaya

Gorka, but their efforts came to nothing. The authorities, on

their side, telephoned the Revolutionary Committee and

vainly attempted to convince it that its position was hopeless.

At the same time, loyal Communists at Kronstadt made use

of the open lines to report on the munitions, food, and morale

of the rebels. 19

For the most part, then, the rebels adopted a defensive

strategy, a strategy which, so they thought, would enable

them to hold out until the thaw had made their position im

pregnable. Meanwhile, they addressed taemselves to admin

istering the affairs of the island, and especially to strengthen

ing its defenses. They hoped that the government would

come to terms but did not rule out the possibility of an armed

assault. "At any moment," warned the Provisional Revolu-

18 "Prichiny, povody, techenie i otsenka Kronshtadtskikh sobytii," manuscript, Hoover Library; Pukhov, Krasnaia Letopis', 1 9 3 1 , No.

1 , p. 1 7 .

19 Petrichenko, Pravda 0 Kronshtadtskikh sobytiiakh, p. 12; Katkov, "The Kronstadt Rising," St. A1ltony's Papers, No. 6, p. 3 3 .

140

FIRST ASSAULT

tionary Committee on March 4, "we may expect an attack

by the Communists with the aim of conquering Kronstadt

and again subordinating us to their authority and reducing

us to hunger, cold, and ruin."20 For the first week, however,

the rebellion remained a war of nerves rather than guns.

Why did the government wait so long before launching

its attack? The delay, it would appear, was dictated as much

-if not more-by the need to make adequate military

preparations as by the desire to arrive at a peaceful settle

ment. During the first days of March the Bolsheviks hastened

to secure the old capital as well as important strategic points

in the surrounding area, particularly Krasnaya Gorka and

Oranienbaum, and Lisy Nos and Sestroretsk on the Karelian

coast. All Communist party members in Petrograd and its

neighboring towns were mobilized and issued arms. By March

5 a militia some 4,000 strong had been collected, augmented

by volunteers from the Young Communists and the local

trade unions. In addition, hundreds of kursanty were called

in from the immediate area as well as from such distant cities

as Moscow, Orel, and Nizhni Novgorod, and special Cheka

troops (V okhr ) and men from the roadblock detachments

were pressed into service against the rebellion. A careful

watch was placed on trains from Petro grad to mainland

points in the direction of Kronstadt t9 prevent any contact

with the insurgents. Soviet leaders, their concern aroused by

the abortive revolt at Oranienbaum ( and perhaps by mem

ories of the anti-Bolshevik mutiny at Krasnaya Gorka in

1 9 1 9 ) , reinforced the garrisons of these strongpoints and

made personal inspection trips to root out any seditious

activity.

In Petrograd itself, although the strikes and demonstra

tions had all but ended, a mood of dark anticipation verging

on panic persisted. One morning in early March, as Victor

Serge was leaving the Hotel Astoria, he saw an old servant

20 Pravda a Kronshtadte, p. 5 1 .

141

FIRST ASSAULT

quietly making her way out with several parcels. "Where

are you off to like this, so early in the morning, grand

mother?" he asked. "There's a smell of trouble about the

town," she replied. "They're going to cut all your throats,

my poor little ones, they're going to be looting everything all

over again."21 Threats against the Jews became widespread.

Many of the city's factories and shops kept their gates shut

because of incessant rumors of renewed outbreaks. On March

3 the Petro grad Defense Committee, now vested with

absolute power throughout the entire province, took stern

measures to prevent any further disturbances. The city

became a vast garrison, with troops patrolling in every

quarter. Notices posted on the walls reminded the citizenry

that all gatherings would be dispersed and those who resisted

shot on the spot. During the day the streets were nearly

deserted, and, with the curfew now set at 9 P.M., night life

ceased altogether. 2:.!

Zinoviev, in his triple role as party boss, chairman of the

Petro grad Soviet, and chairman of the Defense Committee,

made full use of the power concentrated in his hands.

Throughout the emergency he continued to act with efficiency

and dispatch, showing little of his reputed excitability or

tendency to panic . On March 4 he summoned a special ses

sion of the Soviet, with Kronstadt as the main topic on the

agenda. Aside from the regular members, representatives

from other institutions-trade unions, factory committees,

military units, youth organizations-were invited to attend.

The anarchist leaders Alexander Berkman and Emma Gold

man, still on friendly terms with the government, were pre

sent and left vivid descriptions of the proceedings, to which

a few details can be added from contemporary press ac

counts. 23

21 Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, p. 1 25 . 22 Petrogradskaia Pravda, March 3, 1 92 1 ; I zvestiia Petrogradskogo

Soveta, March 3 , 1 92 1 .

23 Berkman, The Kronstadt Rebellion, pp. 30-31; Goldman, Living

142

FIRST ASSAULT

From start to finish the meeting was a stormy one. Zin

oviev and Kalinin denounced the revolt as a White Guard

plot, abetted by Mensheviks, SR's, and Entente intelligence

agents, whereupon a man in the front row, a worker from

the Arsenal factory, stood up and defended the insurgents.

Pointing his finger at Zinoviev, he shouted: "It's the cruel

indifference of yourself and of your party that drove us- to

strike and that roused the sympathy of our brother sailors,

who had fought side by side with us in the Revolution. They

are guilty of no other crime, and you know it . Consciously

you malign them and call for their destruction." Cries of

"counterrevolutionist ," "traitor," and "Menshevik bandit"

Emma Goldman reports-turned the assembly into a bedlam,

but the workman stood his ground, his voice rising above the

tumult : "B arely three years ago Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev,

and all of you were denounced as German spies. We, the

workers and sailors, had come to your rescue and saved

you from the Kerensky Government. Beware that a similar

fate does not overtake you!"

At that point, a Kronstadt sailor rose to the speaker's

defense. Nothing had changed in the revolutionary spirit of

his comrades, he declared. They were ready to defend the

revolution with their last drop of blood. Then he proceeded

to read the Petropav!ovsk resolution, and the meeting, says

Goldman, became a pandemonium of shouting and con

fusion. Zinoviev, replying amid the commotion, demanded

the immediate surrender of Kronstadt on penalty of death.

Over the protest of several delegates, a resolution was adopted

calling on the sailors to abandon their folly and restore au

thority to the Kronstadt Soviet, where it properly belonged.

If blood is spilled, the resolution declared, it will rest on

your own consciences. "Decide at once . Either you are with

My Life, pp. 879-81; Krasnaia Cazeta, March 5, 1 92 1 ; Izvestiia

TsIK, March 6, 1 92 1 . See also Kornatovskii, ed. , Kronshtadtskii

nziatezlz, pp. 40-42; and PrQl'da 0 Krollshladte, pp. 165-66.

143

FIRST ASSAULT

us against the common enemy, or you will perish in shame

and disgrace together with the counterrevolutionaries."24

One figure who had been expected to attend the meeting

was Trotsky, the government's most talented troubleshooter

in times of crisis, but he did not arrive on time. The outbreak

of the rebellion had found him in western Siberia, the scene

of widespread peasant disturbances. On hearing the news he

returned at once to Moscow to consult with Lenin, then

hurried north to Petrograd, reaching the old capital on the

4th or 5th of March. His first act was to issue a harsh

ultimatum ( published on March 5 ) demanding the immediate

and unconditional capitulation of the mutinous sailors :

The Workers\ and Peasants' Government has decreed that

Kronstadt and the rebellious ships must immediately sub

mit to the authority of the Soviet Republic. Therefore, I

command all who have raised their hands against the

socialist fatherland to lay down their arms at once. The

obdurate will be wsarmed and turned over to the Soviet

authorities. The arrested commissars and other representa

tives of the government must be liberated at once. Only

those who surrender unconditionally may count on the

mercy of the Soviet Republic. At the same time, I am

issuing orders to prepare to quell the mutiny and subdue

the mutineers by force of arms. Responsibility for the harm

that may be suffered by the peaceful population will fall

entirely upon the heads of the counterrevolutionary muti

neers. This warning is final. 25

If this was a sincere attempt to avoid an armed clash, it

was obviously bound to fail. Taking no account of the mood

of the sailors, it could only make them more unbending than

24 Kornatovskii, ed. , Kronsh tadtskii miatezh, p. 42.

25 Trotskii, Kak vooruzhalas' revoliutsiia, III, part 1 , 202. The cosigners of the ultimatum were S. S. Kamcnev, commander in chief of the Red Army, and M. N. Tukhachevsky, commander of the

Seventh Army in Petrograd.

144

FIRST ASSAULT

ever in their determination to hold out until reforms had

been granted. "That it should have fallen to Trotsky to ad

dress such words to the sailors," noted his biographer, Isaac

Deutscher, "was another of history's ironies. This had been

his Kronstadt, the Kronstadt he had called 'the pride and the

glory of the revolution.' How many times had he not stumped

the naval base during the hot days of 1 9 17! How many

times had not the sailors lifted him on their shoulders and

wildly acclaimed him as their friend and leader! How devoted

ly had they followed him to the Tauride Palace, to his prison

cell at Kresty, to the walls of Kazan on the Volga, always

taking his advice, always almost blindly following his orders!

How many anxieties they had shared, how many dangers they

had braved together!" But the times were now different, and

the Provisional Revolutionary Committee replied to Trotsky's

ultimatum with a warning of its own : "The ninth wave [that

is, the culminating wave of a storm at sea] of the Toilers'

Revolution has risen and will sweep from the face of Soviet

Russia the vile slanderers and tyrants with all their corrup

tion-and your clemency, Mr. Trotsky, will not be needed."26

On the same day, March 5 , a separate leaflet was issued

by the Petrograd Defense Committee and dropped over

Kronstadt by airplane. If anything, its language was even

more provocative than that of Trotsky's ultimatum. Behind

the SR's and Mensheviks, it read, the White officers are show

ing their fangs. The real leaders of the rebellion are General

Kozlovsky and his aides, Captain Burkser, Kostromitinov,

Shirmanovsky, and other White Guards, who are deceiving

you with promises of democracy and freedom. In actuality,

they are fighting for a restoration of tsarism, for a new Viren

[commander of the Kronstadt naval base until his murder in

February 1 9 17] to sit on your necks. That Petrograd, Siberia,

and the Ukraine are behind you is an insolent lie. The truth

26 Deutscher, The Prophet A rmed, p. 5 1 2; Pravda 0 Kronshtadte,

p. 68.

145

FIRST ASSAULT

is that you are surrounded on all sides, your position is

hopeless. The leaflet concluded with a prophetic warning :

at the last minute, the Kozlovskys and Petrichenkos will leave

you in the lurch and flee to Finland. What will you do then?

If you follow them, do you think you will be fed in Finland?

Haven't you heard what happened to Wrangel's men, who are

dying like flies of hunger and disease? The same fate awaits

you too, unless you surrender within 24 hours. If you do, you

will be pardoned; but if you resist, "you will be shot like

partridges. "27

Although the threat to shoot the rebels "like partridges"

has often been attributed to Trotsky, the true perpetrator was

Zinoviev's Defense Committee. The sailors, in any event,

were roused to a violent fury. Trotsky and Zinoviev became

their archvillains and the symbols of all that was malevolent

and odious within the Soviet regime. (Lenin, who remained

in the background for the moment, was not exposed to

Kronstadt's wrath until the following week, and even then

never with the same venom as his two colleagues. ) Indigna

tion reached fever pitch when the authorities in Petrograd

ordered the families of the Kronstadters arrested as hostages.

A system of hostages had been inaugurated by Trotsky during

the Civil War as a warning to the "military specialists," the

ex-tsarist officers, who might be tempted to betray the Red

forces under their command. "Let the turncoats know,"

read Trotsky's order of September 30, 19 18, "that they are

at the same time betraying the members of their own fam

ilies-fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, wives, and chil

dren ."28 In the case of Kronstadt, however, the decision to

take hostages was not made by Trotsky, as a number of ac

counts suggest, but by the Petrograd Defense Committee be

fore Trotsky's arrival in the city. The Defense Committee de

manded the immediate release of the three Communist

27 Komatovskii, ed., Kronshtadtskii miatezh, pp. 1 88-89. 28 Trotskii, Kak vooruzhalas' revoliutsiia, I, 1 5 1 .

146

FIRST ASSAULT

officials who had been imprisoned by the sailors on March

2 : "If but a hair falls from the head of a detained comrade, it

will be answered by the heads of the hostages."ZI) The an

nouncement was made on March 5, the same day that the

government issued its ultimatum to the rebels. On March

7 the Kronstadt Izvestiia responded with a demand that the

hostages be liberated within 24 hours : "The Kronstadt gar

rison declares that Communists here enjoy full liberty and

their families are absolutely safe. The example of the Pet

rograd Soviet will not be followed here, as we consider

such methods most shameful and vicious, even if prompted

by desperate fury. Never before has history witnessed such

acts."30 Nothing, however, came of this appeal.

Meanwhile, Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman,

having learned of the Bolshevik ultimatum, resolved to do

what they could to prevent a bloodbath. On March 5, with

two of their comrades, they sent a letter to Zinoviev, propos

ing that an impartial commission be formed to mediate the

dispute. The commission, which would consist of five per

sons, two of them anarchists, would go to Kronstadt and try

to work out a peaceful settlement. It was hunger and cold,

said the letter, combined with the absence of any outlet for

their grievances, that had driven the sailors to open protest,

but genuine counterrevolutionaries might try to exploit the

situation unless an immediate solution were found-not by

force of arms but by amicable agreement. Resorting to vio

lence would only aggravate matters and serve the cause of

the Whites. At the same time, the use of force by a Workers'

and Peasants' government against the workers and peasants

themselves would have a profoundly demoralizing effect upon

the international revolutionary movement. 31

29 Pravda and lzvestiia TsIK, March 5, 1 92 1 .

30 Pravda 0 Krollsh tadte, p. 7 3 .

3 1 Berkman, The Bolshe vik Myth , pp. 3 0 1 -302; Goldman, Living

My Life, pp. 882-83. The letter was drafted by Berkman.

14 7

FIRST ASSAULT

There is a good chance that some such conciliatory step,

coming after the failure of the sailors to win support on the

mainland, might have soothed their anger and forestalled the

tragedy which followed. Although Berkman's appeal went

unanswered, the next day, March 6, the Petro grad Soviet

telegraphed the Revolutionary Committee, asking if a delega

tion of both party and nonparty members of the Soviet might

visit Kronstadt to look into the situation. Whether prompted

by the anarchists or not, this was the first constructive and

conciliatory gesture made by the Bolsheviks since the out

break of the rebellion. It is unfortunate, therefore, that it

should have been rejected. Full of bitterness against a govern

ment which had just arrested their wives and children, the

rebels answered that they did "not trust the nonparty status

of your nonparty representatives." Instead, they demanded

that the Petrograd population send true nonparty workers,

soldiers, and sailors, chosen in the presence of Kronstadt

observers, plus a maximum of 15 percent of Communist

delegates to be appointed by the Petro grad Soviet. 32 This

reply, abrupt and unyielding, effectively stifled the proposal.

Afterwards there were no further efforts by the government

to reach an accommodation with the insurgents.

By MARCH 7 the clock had run out. The 24-hour ultimatum

of March 5, extended by another 24 hours the next day,

had expired with neither side modifying its position. And

now the government was ready to use force. During the

period of grace, a steady stream of men and equipment had

been flowing into Petro grad and its neighboring strongholds.

Each day saw the arrival of additional kursanty and Cheka

detachments, and the most reliable units of the Red Army,

drawn from various ·sectors of the country. In addition, some

of the most prominent "military specialists" and Red Com

manders were called in to draw up a plan of attack. On

82 Pravda 0 Kronshtadte, pp. 73-74.

148

FIRST ASSAULT

March 5 M. N. Tukhachevsky, a gifted and an experienced

officer in spite of his youth, was put in charge of the Seventh

Army and of all other troops in the Petro grad Military Dis

trict, replacing D. N. Avrov, whose seat he took on Zinoviev's

Defense Committee. Born of a noble family in Penza prov

ince, Tukhachevsky had been a page in the Imperial Cadet

Corps and a lieutenant in the tsarist army during the First

World War, but after the October Revolution he had shifted

his loyalties to the Bolsheviks, becoming one of the out

standing military leaders of the Civil War. In 1920, at the

age of 27, he had commanded the Red forces on the north

ern Polish front and nearly succeeded in capturing Warsaw

before being turned back by Marshal Pilsudski. 33

Tukhachevsky now faced a task as difficult as any in his

career. The Seventh Army had been stationed in the Petro

grad area throughout the Civil War (blocking Yudenich's

advance in 1 9 1 9) and was now in a "demobilization mood."34

With the fighting over, the men longed to return to their

homes. They were mostly of peasant origin and, sharing the

discontents of the countryside, saw little to criticize in the

rebel program-indeed, the slogans of Kronstadt struck a

sympathetic chord among them. Moreover, the workers'

demonstrations in Petrograd had affected their morale. Ob

viously, then, to send such men to fight their own brethren,

the proverbial "pride and glory" of the revolution, involved

considerable risk. They might well refuse to fire on the rebels

or even go over to their side. Thus Tukhachevsky sought to

bolster their spirits, taking pains to feed and outfit them as

well as he could. But to lead the assault he relied mainly

on the military cadets, the special forces of the Cheka, and

the picked Communist units brought in from other areas.

33 On Tukhachevsky's role in the suppression of Kronstadt, see L. V. Nikulin, Tukhachevskii, Moscow, 1964, pp. 1 3 4-50.

34 Kornatovskii, ed., Kronslztadtskii miatezh, p. 44; S. E. Rabino

vich, "Delegaty 10-go s"ezda RKP (b ) pod Kronshtadtom v 1921 godu," Krasnaia Letopis', 1931, No. 2, pp. 26-31.

149

FIRST ASSAULT

Kronstadt, meanwhile, girded itself for the attack. A key

strategic outpost, it boasted a sizable garrison and excellent

defenses. The rebels numbered some 1 3 ,000 sailors and

soldiers, with perhaps 2,000 additional men recruited from

the civilian population. Kotlin Island was surrounded by

numerous forts and batteries, most of them built in the late

nineteenth century from the plans of General E. I. Totleben,

an outstanding Russian military engineer. On the northern

side were Forts Totleben and Krasnoarmeets and a chain

of seven numbered forts extending towards the Karelian

coastline. On the south were Forts Peter, Paul, Konstantin,

and Alexander, and two numbered forts. All the batteries

and forts were thickly armored and equipped with heavy

guns in turrets. The city proper was encircled by a thick wall

and defended by several gun emplacements. All told, Kron

stadt had 1 35 cannon and 68 machine guns mounted on the

forts and ships. The Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol were each

armed with a dozen 1 2-inch guns and sixteen 1 20-milimeter

guns. Constructed on the eve of the First World War, they

were thoroughly modern men-of-war, among the first dread

noughts in the Imperial Russian Navy. The Petropavlovsk

had been seriously damaged by a British torpedo boat in 1 9 1 9

but had since been repaired and restored to service. Frozen

side by side in the harbor, however, the two battleships were

obviously not as effective as they might have been. Some of

the ice around them had been chopped away, but there was

still inadequate space to maneuver, and to some extent the

large ships obstructed each other's fire . Nevertheless, their

guns far outclassed those of Krasnaya Gorka, the most

powerful fort on the mainland. Only four of the latter's 1 2-

inch cannon were in operating order, since the heavy damage

suffered during the June 1 9 1 9 mutiny had not yet been fully

repaired. The rest of the fort's artillery was of insufficient

caliber to harm distant Kronstadt. Thus, in the event of an

artillery duel, as the author of the Secret Memorandum had

150

FIRST ASSAULT

pointed out, Krasnaya Gorka was no match for the island

fortress and its ships, which boasted twenty-four I2-inch

guns in working order, as well as twelve II-inch and five 1 0-

inch guns. Besides the Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol, more

over, eight other warships lay in the Kronstadt harbor and

repair docks, including a battleship and three heavy cruisers

as well as fifteen gunboats and twenty tugs. Because no ice

breaker was available, however, none of these vessels could

be brought into action.3"

To reduce the fortress, then, was no easy task . In addition

to its excellent defenses, Kronstadt benefited from the wide

expanse of ice which separated it from the Bolshevik strong

holds on the mainland. It was five miles to Oranienbaum and

a dozen to Krasnaya Gorka on the southern shore of the

Gulf, and seven miles to Lisy Nos and eleven to Sestroretsk

on the northern or Karelian coast. Thus an attacking army

would have to cross a terrifying stretch of open ice, unpro

tected from the murderous fire of artillery and machine guns

concealed behind steel and concrete bunkers. It was this

nightmare more than anything else-more than war-weariness

or any sympathy for the defenders-which undermined the

morale of the Communist forces gathered on the shores of

the Finnish Gulf awaiting orders to advance.

Yet, however impregnable the fortress might have ap

peared, it had some serious weaknesses. Among other things,

the stores of ammunition were insufficient to sustain a pro

longed siege; the defenders lacked warm clothing and winter

shoes ; and, owing to the general shortage of fuel, the

Pefropav!ovsk had only 300 tons left (40 tons were consumed

on an average day) and the Sevastopol none at all. Worse

still , food supplies were dwindling rapidly. Although the in-

35 The data on K ronstadt's defenses have been gleaned from Pu

khov, Kronslztadtskii m iatezh, pp. 80-81 ; Kornatovskii, ed. , Krollshtadtskii miatezh, pp. 43 , 9 5 ; Pral'{/a 0 Kroflslztadte, pp. 24, 90;

Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1st edn. , xxxv, 223 ; R ut, March 12, 1921; and London Times, March 1 6 and 30, 1921.

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FIRST ASSAULT

habitants had some potatoes which they had grown them

selves, stocks of canned goods and of horsemeat were pre

cariously low. There was no flour on hand and only a little

bread, of poor quality, enough ( according to well-informed

estimates) to last another two weeks at a daily ration of half

a pound.36 One thing was abundantly clear : both sides would

suffer before the rebellion had run its course.

MILITARY operations began on March 7. At 6:45 in the

evening the Communist batteries at Sestroretsk and Lisy Nos

on the northern shore opened fire on Kronstadt. The barrage,

directed chiefly at the outlying forts, was intended to soften

up the rebel defenses for an infantry assault. When the

forts replied in kind, the cannon of Krasnaya Gorka on the

opposite coast chimed in, answered in turn by the 1 2-inch

guns of the Sevastopol. A full-scale artillery duel was under

way. In Petrograd, Alexander Berkman was crossing the

Nevsky Prospect when he heard the distant rumble of gunfire

rolling towards him. Kronstadt was under attack! The sounds

had a shattering effect on the anarchist leader, destroying the

last remnants of his faith in the Bolshevik regime. "Days of

anguish and cannonading," he recorded in his diary. "My

heart is numb with despair; something has died within me.

The people on the street look bowed with grief, bewildered.

No one trusts himself to speak. The thunder of heavy guns

rends the air."37

March 7 was the anniversary of Women Workers' Day.

Amid the noise of exploding shells, the Kronstadt radio sent

greetings to the working women of the world. Denouncing the

Communists as "the enemies of the toiling people," the rebels

called for an end to tyranny and despotism of every kind.

"May you soon accomplish your liberation from every form

36 Report of Lieutenant R. Kelley, in Quarton to Secretary of State, April 23, 1 92 1 , National Archives, 86 1 .00/86 1 9 .

87 Berkman, The Bolshevik Myth, p. 303.

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FIRST ASSAULT

of violence and oppression. Long live the free revolutionary

working women ! Long live the Worldwide Social Revolu

tion!"38

The exchange of cannon fire did not last long; a combina

tion of snow and dense fog reduced visibility to zero, causing

both sides to break off their barrage. Damage to Kronstadt

was slight, and only two defenders were injured. Nonethe

less, the Revolutionary Committee expressed its outrage. The

first shots have been fired, declared the Kronstadt Izvestiia

the next morning, but we shall sink the approaching "pirate

ship" of the Bolsheviks. "All power to the soviets! Keep

your hands off this power, hands stained with the blood of

those who have fallen in the cause of freedom, in the struggle

with the White Guards, the landlords, and the bourgeoisie!"39

In keeping with Tukhachevsky's plan, the artillery bom

bardment was followed by an attempt to take the fortress by

storm. The attack, carried out by Communist forces from

both the northern and southern shores of the mainland, came

the next morning before dawn . In a blinding snowstorm

Tukhachevsky's troops started across the ice, shrouded in

white coveralls to blend with the snow covering the Finnish

Gulf. Out in front were detachments of military cadets, fol

lowed by picked Red Army units, with Cheka machine gun

ners bringing up the rear to discourage any would-be desert

ers. The defenders were ready and waiting. As the troops

approached, they were met by a murderous barrage of artil

lery and machine-gun fire from the forts and batteries around

the island. Some of the exploding shells cracked open the

ice, plunging scores of attackers into a watery grave. It was

the beginning, as Serge noted, of a ghastly fratricide.40 After

the Gulf had swallowed its first victims, some of the Red

soldiers, including a body of Peterhof kursanty, began to

38 Pra�'da 0 Krollslztadte, p. 80.

39 I bid.

40 Serge, Memoirs of a Re�'olutiollary, p. 1 30.

153

FIRST ASSAULT

defect to the insurgents. Others refused to advance, in spite

of threats from the machine gunners at the rear who had

orders to shoot any waverers. The commissar of the northern

group reported that his troops wanted to send a delegation

to Kronstadt to find out about the insurgents' demands. The

night before, it appears, Bolshevik soldiers had already gone

across in small numbers to exchange literature with the de

fenders. 41 In the end, only a fraction of the assault troops

succeeded in reaching the outermost forts, but even they were

compelled to withdraw under a thick blanket of fire.

By dawn the snowstorm had subsided, revealing a broad

expanse of ice littered with corpses on every side. With visi

bility restored, the Communist batteries resumed their pound

ing of the fortress, while the heavy guns of Kronstadt returned

their fire, damaging a section of railway between Oranien

baum and Peterhof and setting a number of buildings aflame.

An occasional probing action by Soviet infantry failed to

yield any results. During the afternoon Communist airplanes

flew over the Gulf to bomb Kronstadt's fortifications, the first

air attack on the island since Yudenich's Baltic campaign

in 1 9 1 9 . Although the raids continued sporadically through

out the rest of the day, they caused little harm. About 6 P.M.

one bomb landed inside the city itself, damaging a house and

slightly wounding a thirteen-year-old boy. Throughout the

revolt Bolshevik air attacks were never very effective, thanks

to heavy ground fire and frequently poor visibility. 42

The fighting on March 8 had scarcely begun when the

Petrograd Soviet triumphantly announced that the rebels were

already "in full rout." The same day, Lenin, addressing the

opening session of the Tenth Party Congress in Moscow, was

41 Petrichenko, Pra\,da 0 Kronshtadtskikh sobytiiakh, p. 1 2 ; Mett,

La Commune de Cronstadt, p. 5 1 .

42 For additional details of the March 8 assault, see Kornatovskii, ed ., Kronshtadtskii miatezh, pp. 44-46, 67-68; Petrichenko, Pravda 0 Kronshtadtskikh sobytiiakh, pp. 1 4- 1 5 ; and Pravda 0 Kronshtadte,

pp. 23, 90, 1 06, 1 80.

154

FIRST ASSAULT

equally confident of the outcome. "I do not yet have the latest

news from Kronstadt," he said, "but I have no doubt that

this uprising, behind which looms the familiar figure of the

White Guard general, will be liquidated within the next few

days, if not hours. "43 These declarations, as it turned out,

were premature. Actually, the assault of March 8 proved·

an unmitigated failure. The Communists lost hundreds of

men without even breaching Kronstadt's defenses . 44 In their

haste to suppress the revolt, they had deployed an insufficient

force-perhaps 20,000 in all-and had made inadequate

preparations for a successful storming of the powerful for

tress. Troops chosen for their reliability had faltered at the

crucial moment, partly out of reluctance to fire on ordinary

sailors and soldiers like themselves, but mainly for fear of

crossing the open ice without protection of any kind, exposed

to the devastating crossfire of Kronstadt's batteries and forts.

That evening a party of Bolsheviks approached Kronstadt

from the south, carrying a flag of truce. Two members of the

Provisional Revolutionary Committee, Vershinin and Ku

polov, went out on horseb3ck to meet them. According to a

kursant in the Bolshevik party, Vershinin, a sailor from the

Sevastopoi, shouted an appeal for joint action against the

Jewish and Communist oppressors, and called for the election

of a true revolutionary authority in the form of free soviets. 45

In any event, Vershinin was seized on the spot, but Kupolov

managed to gallop to safety.

The rebels were incensed at this treachery, but their feel

ings of outrage were tempered by compassion for the fallen

Bolshevik soldiers. In an editorial entitled "Let the \Vhole

4�: IZl'estiia Petrogradskogo SOI'eta, March 8, 1 921; Desia!yi s"ezd

RKP(b), p. 3 3 .

44 A well-informed source estimates Bolshevik losses a s 5 0 0 dead and 2,000 wounded: "Kak nachalos' vosstanie v Kronshtadte," March 12, 192 1 , Miller Archives, File 5M, No. 5.

45 Korn atovskii, ed. , Krollslztadtskii miatezlz, pp. 95-96. Cf. Pravda o Krollshtadte, pp, 94-98, 129.

155

FIRST A.SSA.ULT

World Know," the Revolutionary Committee bitterly accused

"Field Marshal" Trotsky of responsibility for the bloodshed.

To a void further violence, the committee agam proposed

that a nonparty delegation be sent to Kronstadt to learn

the true facts about their movement. "Let the toilers of the

whole world know that we, the defenders of soviet power, are

guarding the conquests of the Social Revolution. We shall win

or perish beneath the ruins of Kronstadt, fighting for the just

cause of the laboring masses. The toilers of the world will be

our judges. The blood of the innocent will fall upon the heads

of the Communist fanatics, drunk with power. Long live the

power of the soviets!"46


156

5. The Kronstadt Program

The Kronstadt rebellion lasted only a little more than two

weeks. Yet, during this short time, a revolutionary commune

of a remarkable type was established under the leadership

of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee, whose members,

while having no long-term strategy to speak of, displayed

considerable gifts of improvisation and self-organization. The

committee, as we have seen, had been created on March 2

from the five-man presidium of the conference in the House

of Education. But it soon became clear that a larger body

would be needed to handle the administration and defense

of the city and garrison. Thus, on the evening of March 4,

some 200 delegates from Kronstadt's factories and military

units-presumably the same delegates who had met in the

House of Education two days before-gathered after work in

the Garrison Club and, amid cries of "Victory or death!,"

elected an enlarged Revolutionary Committee of 1 5 mem

bers.I

To facilitate the task of directing Kronstadt's civilian and

military affairs, the new committee moved its headquarters

from the battleship Petropavlovsk to the House of the People,

located in the city proper. And to assist Petrichenko, the

committee's chairman, Yakovenko and Arkhipov were chosen

as deputy chairmen and Kilgast as secretary. Each of the

remaining members was assigned a specific area of responsi

bility : civic affairs were administered by Valk and Roman

enko, justice by Pavlov, and transportation by Baikov (whose

regular job in Kronstadt had been transport chief of the

fortress construction department ) , while Tukin was in charge

of food supply and Perepelkin of agitation and propaganda. 2

In keeping with Point 9 of the Petropavlovsk resolution,

I Pravda a Kronshtadte, pp. 56-57.

2 Novaia R usskaia Zhizn', March 1 1 , 1 92 1 ; Pukhov, Kronsh tadtskii

miatezh, p. 76.

157

THE KRONSTADT PROGRAM

differential food rationing was abolished. Special rations were

given only to hospitals and children's homes, and extra food

might also be dispensed to the sick on the written prescription

of a doctor. Otherwise food in Kronstadt was issued on an

equal basis in exchange for coupons. Distribution was han

dled by two existing agencies, Gorkommuna and Gorprod

kom, under the Revolutionary Committee's close super

vision. From time to time the points of distribution were

announced in the rebel newspaper, the daily Izvestiia of the

Provisional Revolutionary Committee. The committee also

used the radio of the Petropavlovsk to broadcast special an

nouncements to the town popUlation and to communicate

with the outside world. 3

In the first days of the uprising, an 11 P.M. curfew was

imposed and movement in and out of the city placed under

strict control. Schools were closed until further notice. At the

same time, the Revolutionary Committee issued a series of

edicts affecting Kronstadt's political structure. Following

Point 7 of the Petropavlovsk resolution, it abolished the po

litical department of the fortress and launched a new educa

tional program at the Garrison Club. The local Workers' and

Peasants' Inspectorate was replaced by a commission of trade

union delegates, intended, one suspects, as a model for the

"itinerant bureau of control" specified in Point 14 of the

Petropavlovsk charter. Furthermore, in every public institu

tion, trade union, factory, and military unit, a revolutionary

troika was elected-without Communist members-to carry

out the orders of the Revolutionary Committee at the local

level. 4

Alongside of the Revolutionary Committee, the conference

of delegates which convened in the House of Education on

3 Pravda 0 Kronshtadte, pp. 52-54, 77-78: Be rkman, The Krons/adt

Rebellion, pp. 20-21. All fourteen issues of iZl'eSfiia are reproduced in Pravda 0 Kronshtadte, which thus constitutes the most valuable

source on the program and activities of the insurgents.


158

�' ,I


March 2 remained in existence for the duration of the rebel

lion, with a membership that fluctuated between two and

three hundred sailors, soldiers, and workingmen . The confer

ence met on March 4 to enlarge the Revolutionary Commit

tee, and again on March 8 and 11, when, among other things,

it created a new Kronstadt Trade Union Council, free from

the domination and control of the Communist party. Not

surprisingly, however, its agenda was chiefly occupied with

questions of defense and of food and fuel supply.5 As de

scribed by one authority, the conference was Kronstadt's

own distinctive form of parliament,6 but more accurately,

perhaps, it served as a kind of interim Soviet, a prototype of

the "free soviets" for which the insurgents had risen in revolt.

It was the sailors, the most militant element of the Kron

stadt population, who were the driving force behind this

activity. In matters of organization, planning, and propa

ganda, the bluejackets took the initiative from the first, and

continued to play a dominant role in the movement through

out its brief history. Not a single soldier ( much less an

officer) held a seat on the Provisional Revolutionary Com

mittee, and civilian workmen and employees formed only a

small minority of its membership. But if the sailors took the

lead, the Kronstadt garrison-the "military specialists" and

the Red Army troops who manned the surrounding forts and

batteries-soon fell into line; and the townspeople too, always

susceptible to the influence of the seamen, with whom their

occupations brought them into close contact, offered their

active support. For a fleeting interval Kronstadt was shaken

out of its listlessness and despair. A Finnish journalist who

visited the island at the height of the rebellion was struck

by the "enthusiasm" of its inhabitants, by their renewed sense

of purpose and mission. 7

5 Ibid., pp. 56-57; Rel'oliutsioll11aia Rossiia, 1 92 1, No. 7, p. 22.

6 Pukhov, Krollslztadtskii miatezh , p. 85.

7 Za Narodnoe Delo, March 1 5, 1 92 1 .

159

THE KRONST ADT PROGRAM

Kronstadt's mood, it has often been noted,8 was a throw

back to the ebullience and high excitement of 19 17 . For the

sailors, who styled themselves "Communards," 1 9 17 was

the Golden Age, and they longed to recapture the spirit of the

revolution, when the trammels of discipline were discarded

and their ideals were as yet uncontaminated by the exigencies

of power. Four years before, when they cast their lot with

the Bolsheviks, they thought they shared the same objec

tives ; the Bolsheviks, by all appearances, were fellow revolu

tionaries of the extreme Left, apostles of a mass upheaval

that would eliminate coercion and injustice and usher in a

toilers' republic of free soviets. "Socialism," Lenin himself

declared in November 19 17, "is not created by orders from

above. State-bureaucratic automatism is alien to its spirit ;

socialism is alive, creative-the creation of the popular

masses themselves ."9 The succeeding months, however, saw

the emergence of a centralized dictatorship, and the sailors

felt betrayed. They felt that the democratic principles for

which they had struggled had been abandoned by a new

privileged elite. During the Civil War they remained loyal

to the Bolsheviks but were determined to restore the rev

olution to its original path . And once the danger of the Whites

had been eliminated, they rose to redeem the pledges of

October.

As a political movement, then, the Kronstadt revolt was

an attempt by disillusioned revolutionaries to throw off the

"nightmare rule" of the Communist dictatorship, as the rebel

lzvestiia described it,10 and restore the effective power of

the soviets. Historically, the soviet was traceable to the

village commune, the traditional Russian institution of local

self-government. As Emma Goldman observed, it was nothing

8 See, for example, Valine. La R evolution il/connue, p. 462 ; Berk· m an, The Kronstadt Rebellion, p. 1 8 ; and Katkov, "The Kronstadt

Rising," St. A ntony's Papers, No. 6, p . 70.

9 Lenin, Po/noe sobranie sochinenii, xxxv, 57. 10 Pravda 0 Kronshtadte, p. 55.

1 60


but "the old Russian mir in an advanced and more revolu

tionary form. It is so deeply rooted in the people that it

sprang naturally from the Russian soil as flowers do in the

fields."ll For Lenin, however, free soviets, independent of

party control, had always been anathema. He instinctively

distrusted the spontaneous action of the people. Organs of

local democracy, he feared, might serve as a potential bridge

for reaction or lead to economic and social chaos. Neverthe

less, when the revolution came and local soviets sprang up

everywhere, he recognized their value as a force to destroy

the old order and as a means to acquire power. "All power

to the soviets" became one of his party's principal watch

words. After the October coup, however, Lenin reverted to

his original centralism by imposing a revolutionary dictator

ship upon the anarchic and undisciplined masses. And al

though the soviet system continued to be upheld as a new and

higher form of government, as the "proletarian dictatorship"

envisioned by Marx, the soviets were progressively sub

jected to party control, so that by 1 92 1 they had become

mere rubber stamps for the emerging bureaucracy.

It was against this perversion of the revolution that the

sailors rose in protest. The conflict, as they saw it, was be

tween the popular ideal of a "toilers' republic" and a "pro

letarian dictatorship" that was in fact a dictatorship of the

Bolsheviks. Opposed to the exclusive rule of any single

party, they aimed at breaking up the Communist monopoly

of power by securing freedom of speech, press, and as

sembly for the workers and peasants, and by holding new

elections to the soviets. The sailors, as Berkman noted,

were the staunchest supporters of the soviet system ; their

battle-cry was the Bolshevik slogan of 1 9 1 7 : "All power

to the soviets ."1 2 But, in contrast to the Bolsheviks, they de

manded free and unfettered soviets, representing all left-

11 Avrich, The Russian A narchists. p. 252 .

12 Berkman. The Kronstadt Rebellion, pp. 24-2 5.

161


wing organizations-SR's, Mensheviks, anarchists, Maxi

malists-and reflecting the true aspirations of the people.

Thus the motto on the masthead of the rebel Izvestiia had

a new twist : "All power to the soviets but not the parties."

"Our cause is just," declared the Petropavlovsk radio on

March 6. "We stand for power to the soviets but not the

parties, for the freely elected representation of the toilers.

The soviets that have been captured and manipulated by

the Communist party have always been deaf to all our de

mands and needs ; the only reply we have ever received has

been shooting. "13

But if the rebels called for free soviets, they were not

democrats in the . sense of advocating equal rights and

liberties for all. Like the Bolsheviks whom they condemned,

they maintained a rigorous class attitude towards Russian

society. When they spoke of freedom, it was freedom only

for the workers and peasants, not for the landlords or

middle classes. This, indeed, was what they meant by a

"toilers' republic"-the exercise of the general will of the

laboring masses over their former oppressors and exploiters.

There was no place in their program for a liberal par

liament on West European lines, and it is symbolic that

a Kronstadt seaman should have led the dispersal of the

Constituent Assembly in January 19 18. Three years later

the sailors remained firmly opposed to the Assembly or

to any similar institution. In their eyes, a national parliament

would inevitably be dominated by a new privileged minority,

if not by the very same elements which had been driven to

flight by the revolution. They had no use for representative

government, but wanted direct mass democracy of and by

the common people through free soviets. "The soviets and

not the Constituent Assembly are the bulwark of the toilers,"

proclaimed the organ of the Provisional Revolutionary Com-

l3 /bid., p. 1 9 ; Pravda 0 Kronshtadte, p. 65.

1 62


mittee.1 4 For the rebels, in short, parliament and the soviets

were antithetical forms of government, the one entailing

the supremacy of the bourgeoisie, the other of the toilers.

But they feared, too, that any new Assembly would become

merely another tool of the Bolsheviks in their quest for

absolute power. After the fall of Kronstadt, a Soviet re

porter asked a group of survivors why they had not called

for the restoration of the Constituent Assembly. "Party lists

mean Communists" (A raz spiski-znachit kommunisty ) ,

one of them replied with a wry smile. What we want, he

said, is genuine self-determination of the workers and peas

ants, and it is only through the soviets that this can be

achieved. 15

IN ITS economic content, the Kronstadt program was a

broadside aimed at the system of War Communism. It re

flected the determination of the peasantry and working

class to sweep away the coercive policies to which they had

been subjected for nearly three years. The Kronstadters ( fol

lowing an age-old Russian practice ) charged the govern

ment-and the government alone-with all the ills that af

flicted the country. Little blame was attached to the chaos and

destruction of the Ch:il War itself, to the inescapable ravages

of contending armies, to the Allied intervention and blockade,

to the unavoidable scarcity of fuel and taw materials, or to the

difficulties of feeding the hungry and healing the sick in

the midst of famine and pestilence. All the suffering and

hardship, rather, was laid at the door of the Bolshevik re

gime : "Communist rule has reduced all of Russia to un

precedented poverty, hunger, cold, and other privations.

The factories and mills are closed, the railways on the verge

of breakdown. The countryside has been fleeced to the bone.

14 Pravda 0 Krollshtadte, p. 1 3 2 .

15 Ibid., p. 3 1 .

1 63


We have no bread, no cattle, no tools to work the land.

We have no clothing, no shoes, no fuel. The workers are

hungry and cold . The peasants and townsfolk have lost all

hope for an improvement of their lives. Day by day they

come closer to death. The Communist betrayers have re

duced you to all this."16

The sailors, like the peasants from whom most of them

sprang, severely condemned the "new serfdom" of the Bol

shevik regime, particularly the seizure of food by armed

collection detachments. "The peasant was right," declared

the Kronstadt /zvestiia, "who told the Eighth Congress of

Soviets : 'Everything is just fine-the land is ours but the

grain is yours, the water ours but the fish yours, the forests

ours but the wood yours.' "17 Any villagers who balked at

the government's depredations, the journal added, were de

nounced as "kulaks" and "enemies of the people," regard

less of how impoverished and desperate they might be.

lzvestiia further decried the establishment of state farms on

some of the best gentry land, a practice which not only de

prived the peasants of what they considered their rightful

possession but also entailed the use of hired labor as in

tsarist times. This, as the insurgents saw it, violated the

essential spirit of the revolution, which had abolished "wage

slavery" and exploitation in every form. lzvestiia upheld

the right of the peasants to carry on small-scale cultivation

by their own efforts and for their own benefit. State farms

were nothil).g but "the estates of the new landlord-the state.

This is what the peasants have received from the socialism

of the Bolsheviks, instead of the free use of their newly won

lands. In exchange for requisitioned grain and confiscated

cows and horses, they got Cheka raids and firing squads. A

16 Ibid., pp. 1 64-65. 17 Ibid. , pp. 82-84, 1 63 . No record of this statement appears in

the official minutes of the Congress, but it could have been made

at a closed session, such as the one discussed in Chapter 1 which Lenin attended.

1 64


fine system of exchange in a workers' state-lead and

bayonets for bread!"18

In industry, by the same token, the rebels wanted free

dom for the workers and small handicrafts producers to

control their own destiny and enjoy the products of their

labor. They did not, however, favor "workers' control/"

as is often supposed. The mere supervision of production

by local factory committees was, as they saw it, at once

inadequate and inefficient : inadequate because, instead of

allowing the workers to run the factories themselves, it

left the former managers and technicians in key positions

of responsibility ; and inefficient because it did not provide

for necessary coordination with other enterprises. Nor did

they approve of the nationalization of industry with state

control of production by appointed managers and technical

specialists. "Having disorganized production under 'work

ers' control,' " declared the Kronstadt Izvestiia, "the Bolshe

viks proceeded to nationalize the factories and shops. From

a slave of the capitalist the worker was transformed into a

slave of the state enterprises." At the same time, the trade

unions had become a "centralized Communist edifice,"

reduced to useless paperwork instead of running the fac

tories and assisting in the educational and cultural advance

ment of the workers. Only new elections could convert the

unions into free institutions for the "broad self-determina

tion" of the workers. As for artisans and craftsmen, they

should be given complete freedom provided they did not em

ploy hired labor. "Revolutionary Kronstadt," proclaimed the

Provisional Committee, "is fighting for a different kind of

socialism, for a Soviet Republic of the toilers, in which the

producer himself will be the sole master and can dispose

of his products as he sees fit." 19

The dominant note of the rebellion, then, was disillu

sionment with Communist rule. The Bolsheviks, said the rebel

1 S lbid., pp. 1 72-74. 19 lbid., pp. 92, 1 73-74.

1 65


lzvestiia, were only afraid of losing power, and so deemed

"every means permissible-slander, violence, dec,eit, mur

der, vengeance upon the families of the rebels."20 The mean

ing of the revolution had been caricatured, the workers and

peasants subdued, the whole country silenced by the party

and its secret police, the prisons filled not with counterrev

olutionaries but with laborers and intellectuals. "In place of

the old regime," lamented lzvestiia, "a new regime of arbi

trariness, insolence, favoritism, theft, and speculation has

been established, a terrible regime in which one must hold

out one's hand to the authorities for every piece of bread,

for every button, a regime in which one does not belong

even to oneself, where one cannot dispose of one's labor, a

regime of slavery and degradation. . . . Soviet Russia has

become an all-Russian concentration camp.":?l

What, then, was to be done? How could the revolution be

returned to its original path? Until March 8, when the Bol

sheviks launched their initial assault, the insurgents con

tinued to hope for peaceful reform. Convinced of the right

eousness of their cause, they were confident of gaining the

support of the whole country-and Petrograd in particular

-in forcing the government to grant political and economic

concessions. The Communist attack, however, marked a

new phase in the rebellion. All chance of negotiation and

compromise came to an abrupt end. Violence remained the

only course open to both sides. On March 8 the sailors

proclaimed a new slogan : they appealed to the entire Rus

sian population to join them in a "third revolution" to

finish the job begun in February and October 1 9 17 : "The

workers and peasants steadfastly march forward, leaving

behind them both the Constituent Assembly, with its bour

geois regime, and the dictatorship of the Communist party,

20 Ibid., p. 8 3 . The last phrase, of course, is a reference to the seizure of hostages in Petrograd.

21 Ibid., pp. 1 28, 1 65 .

1 66

THE KRONSTADT PROGRAiU

with its Cheka and its state capitalism, whose hangman's

n oose encircles the necks of the laboring m asses and

threatens to strangle them to de ath . . . . Here in Kronstadt

has been laid the first stone of the third revolution, striking

the last fetters from the laboring masses and opening a broad

new road for socialist creativity ." :! :!

RE PEATED attempts have been made by Western as well

as Soviet historians to trace the Kron stadt program to one

or another of the anti-Bolshevik parties of the Left. To

what extent are such compari30ns valid? On a number of

points the rebel demands did indeed coincide with those of

the left-wing political opposition . �1ensheviks, Socialist Rev

olutionaries, and anarchists had all been protesting against

the Bolshevik monopoly of power and the system of War

Communism. They had all been calling for free soviets and

trade unions , for civil li berties for workers and peasants,

and for an end to the terror and the release of socialists

and anarchists under arrest. And the demand for a coalition

government in which all �ocialist parties would be repre

sented had been m ade by SR's and lvlensheviks as early as

October 1 9 1 7-to which even an outspoken group of Bol

sheviks h ad lent their support : "We take the stand that it is

necessary to form a socialist government of all parties in the

Soviet. We assert that other than this there is only one path :

the preservation of a purely Bolshevik government by means

of political terror. We cannot and will not accept this. \Ve

see that this will lead . . . to the establishment of an irrespon-

2 2 Ibid. , pp. 83 -84. The hopes and demands of the rebels, summ arized above, are most clearly set fo rth in three documents : the

PetropadO\'sk resolution of Feb ruary 28-March 1 , and two long editorials in the rebel journal , "What We Are Fighting For," p ublished

on March 8, and "Socialism in Quotation Marks." which appeared

in the very last issue of Mai'ch 1 6 . Taken togethe r. these documents p resent the fullest and most eloquent statement of the K ronstadt p rogram. The Pelropal 'lO \ 'sk resolution is pri nted in Chapter 2 , and the two editorials appear in the Appendixes.

1 67


sible regime and to the ruin of the revolution and the

country."23

The rebels shared one notable feature with the Socialist

Revolutionaries, namely an overriding preoccupation with

the needs of the peasant and small producer and a corre

sponding lack of concern for the complexities of large-scale

industry. But they refused, on the other hand, to endorse

the central SR demand for the restoration of the Con

stituent Assembly or to accept the assistance offered them

by the respected SR leader Victor Chernov. From this alone

it is plain that the SR's did not exert a dominant influence

within the rebel movement. The same was true of the

Mensheviks. The Mensheviks, to be sure, had been the fore

most champions of the soviets since their first appearance

in 1 90 5 , and the Kronstadt idea of a nonpartisan conference

of workers, soldiers, and sailors recalls a similar proposal

by the Menshevik leader Akselrod, which had formed the

theoretical basis for the establishment of the original Peters

burg Soviet. Nevertheless, Menshevik influence had never

been very great in Kronstadt, a traditional stronghold of

the extreme Left. A number of active Mensheviks were to

be found among the artisans and workingmen in the town and

shipyards ( the two members of the Revolutionary Commit

tee whom Soviet sources identify as Mensheviks, Valk and

Romanenko, were both workmen ) , yet the Kronstadt pro

gram paid comparatively little attention to questions affect

ing the industrial proletariat. Moreover, the number of

Mensheviks among the sailors-the backbone of the insur

rection-was negligible. It is also worth noting that through

out the course of the revolt the Menshevik leadership in

Petrograd and abroad refrained from endorsing the over

throw of the Bolsheviks by force of arms.

The influence of the anarchists, by contrast, had always

been fairly strong within the fleet, and they have sometimes

2� Daniels, The CUllscience of the R evolution, p. 66.

168


been charged with inspiring the uprising. But this is largely

untrue . For one thing, the most prominent Kronstadt an

archists of recent years were no longer on the scene : Anatoli

Zhelezniakov, the fierce young sailor who had dispersed

the Constituen t Assembly, had been killed in action against

the Whites ;24 I. S. Bleikhman, a popular Anchor Square

orator in 1 9 1 7, had died a few months before the revolt;

and his comrade Efim Y archuk, a leading figure in the

Kronstadt Soviet during the revolution, was now in Moscow,

and, when not in prison, was kept under close watch by the

Cheka. Yarchuk's own history of Kronstadt assigns no out

standing role to the anarchists in 1 92 1 , nor does any other

anarchist source of the period . A thorough listing of an

archists who died in the Civil War or fell victim to Soviet

persecution during the early 1 920's includes Zhelezniakov,

Yarchuk, and Bleikhman but no other Kronstadters .25 Only

one member of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee

( Perepelkin ) has ever been linked with the anarchists, and

then only indirectly. M oreover, the journal of the movement

mentions the anarchists only once, when publishing the text

of the Petropavlovsk m anifesto, which dem anded "freedom

of speech and press for workers and peasants, anarchists

and left-wing socialist parties . " 26

Still, the spirit of anarchism, so powerful in Kronstadt

during 1 9 1 7, h ad by no means dissipated. Perepelkin m ay

24 Avrich, The Russian A narchists, p. 1 9 8 . A statue of Zhelezniakov stands today in the city of K ronstadt : Kronslztadt: kratkii pute l 'oditel',

p. 1 1 6. 25 Goneniia no anarkhiZI1l v SOI'elskoi Rossii, Berlin, 1 922. 26 Dan, D m goda ski/anU, p. 1 5 6 ; Prm'da 0 Kronshtadte. p. 46, Cf.

Katkov, "The K ronstadt Rising," St. A ntony's Papers, No. 6, pp. 5 9-62. According to the prominent anarchist Volin ( La Rel'ollllion

incollnue, pp. 469-70 ) , the Provisional Revolutionary Committee sent emissaries to Petrograd to bring Yarchuk and himself to Kron

stadt to assist in the rebellion, unaware that they had been imprisoned by the Bolsheviks. Volin adds th at Pet richenko had anarchist sympathies, but I h ave found no evidence to confirm these claims.

1 69


have been the only reputed anarchist among the rebel

leaders, but as coauthor of the Petropavlovsk resolution and

head of agitation and propaganda, he was in a good position

to propagate his libertarian views. Some of the key slogans

of the movement-"free soviets," "third revolution," "Down

with the commissarocracy"-had been anarchist slogans

during the Civil War, and "All power to the soviets but not

the parties" also had an anarchist ring. On the other hand,

most anarchists would have balked at any appeal for

"power," and the sailors, for their part, never called for the

complete elimination of the state, a central plank in any

anarchist platform.

In any case, anarchists throughout Russia were elated

by the rising. They hailed Kronstadt as "the Second Paris

Commune,"::!7 and angrily denounced the government for

sending troops against it. At the height of the insurrection,

an anarchist leaflet appeared in the streets of Petrograd ; it

criticized the population for turning its back on the rebels,

for remaining silent while the thunder of artillery sounded

in the Finnish Gulf. The sailors have risen for you , the peo

p1e of Petrograd, the leaflet declared . You must shake off

your lethargy and j oin the struggle against the Communist

dictatorshi p, after which anarchism will prevail . 28 Other

anarchists, meanwhile, such as Berkman and Goldman, were

vainly seeking to mediate the conflict and avert a bloodbath .

The rebellion, in short, was neither inspired nor engi

neered by any single party or group. Its participants were

radicals of various stripes-SR's, Mensheviks, anarchists,

rank-and-fiJe Com munists-who possessed no system atic id

eology nor any careful1y l aid plan of action. Their credo,

compounded of elements from several revolutionary strains,

was vague and ill-defined, more a list of grievances, an out

cry of protest agai nst misery and oppression, than a coherent

27 Avrich, The R ussian A narchists, p. 230. 28 Kornatovskii, ed ., Kronshtadtskii miatezh, pp. 1 64-66

1 70


and constructive program . In place of specific proposals, par

ticularly in agriculture and industry, the insurgents preferred

to rely on what Kropotkin called "the creative spirit of the

masses," operating through freely elected soviets .

Their ideology, perhaps, may best be described as a kind

of anarcho-populism, whose deepest urge was to realize the

old N arodnik program of "l and and liberty" and "the will of

the people," the ancient dream of a loose-knit federation of

autonomous communes in which peasants and workers

would live in harmonious cooperation, with full economic

and political liberty organized from below. The political

group closest to the rebels in temperament and outlook were

the SR Maximalists, a tiny ultra-militant offshoot of the

Socialist Revolutionary party, occupying a place in the revo

lutionary spectrum between the Left SR's and the anarchists

while sharing elements of both. On nearly every important

point the Kronstadt program, as set forth in the rebel I zves

liia, coincided with that of the Maximalists, lending credence

to the Soviet claim that the editor of the journal was a

Maximalist ( Lam anov by name ) . 29 The Maximalists

preached a doctrine of total revolution. They opposed the

restoration of the Constituent Assembly and called instead

for a "toilers' soviet republic" founded on freely elected

soviets, with a min imum of central state authority. Politically,

this was identical with the objective of the Kronstadters, and

"Power to the soviets but not the parties" had originally been

a Maximalist rallying-cry.

The parallels in the economic sphere are no less striking.

In agriculture the Maximalists denounced grain requisition

ing and the establishment of state farms, demanding that all

the land be turned over to the peasants for their unhindered

2!J Slepkov, Krollshtadtskii miatezh , p. 33 ; Pukhov, Kronshtadtskii

m iatezh, p. 77. Although there is no mention of him in the sou :ces for the 1 92 1 rebellion, A. Lamanov was in fact an active M aximalist

agitator during the Revolution of 1 9 1 7 .

1 71


use. In industry they rejected workers' control over bour

geois administrators in favor of the "social organization of

production and its systematic direction by representatives of

the toiling people." For the Maximalists, as for the rebels,

this did not mean the nationalization of the factories and a

centralized system of state m anagement; on the contrary,

they warned repeatedly that centralization leads directly to

"bureaucratism," reducing the laborer to a mere cog in a

vast impersonal machine. "Not state management and

workers' control, but workers' management and state con

trol" was their motto, with the government performing the

tasks of planning and coordination. It was essential, in short,

to transfer the means of production to the people who used

them. This was the message of every Maximalist slogan : "All

land to the peasants," "All factories to the workers," "All

bread and products to the toilers."30

THAT the mentality of the rebellion was essentially anarcho

populist is clear from the language and myths of its partici

pants . Propaganda in Kronstadt was conducted by men whose

emotions and rhetoric were close to the peasants' and workers'

own feelings. Expressed in simple slogans and catchphrases,

it possessed a rough folk eloquence which captured the mood

of the people at large. Rebel agitators wrote and spoke ( as

an interviewer later noted ) 31 in a homespun language free

of Marxist jargon and foreign-sounding expressions. Eschew

ing the word "proletariat," they called, in true populist fash

ion, for a society in which all the "toilers"-peasants, work

ers, and the "toiling intelligentsia"-would play a dominant

role. They were inclined to speak of a "social" rather than a

30 Soiuz S-R Maksimalistov, Trudovaia sovetskaia respublika,

Moscow, 1 9 1 8, and 0 rabochem kontrole, Moscow, 1 9 1 8 ; G. Nes

troev, Maksimalizm i bol'shevizm, Moscow, 1 9 1 9 ; Maksimalist, No. 2, August 25, 1 9 1 8 , pp. 5-9 and No. 1 6 , April 1 5 , 1 92 1 , pp. 1 5- 1 6 .

31 "Beseda s Kronshtadtsami," R evoliutsionnaia Rossiia, 1 92 1 , No.

8, pp. 6-8.

1 72


"socialist" revolution, viewing class conflict not in the nar

row sense of industrial workers versus bourgeoisie, but in the

traditional Narodnik sense of the laboring masses as a whole

pitted against all who throve on their misery and exploitation,

including politicians and bureaucrats as well as l andlords and

capitalists. Western ideologies-Marxism and liberalism,

alike-had little place in their mental outlook. Their distrust

of parliamentary government was deeply rooted in the populist

and anarchist heritage : Herzen, Lavrov, and Bakunin had all

rejected parliament as a corrupt and alien institution, a

"talking-shop" to safeguard the interests of the upper and

middle classes against the claims of the rejected and outcast,

for whom the path to salvation lay in local self-rule based on

the traditional Russian commune.

The Kronstadters, moreover, exhibited a powerful streak

of Slavic n ation alism, which, in view of their predominantly

peasant origins, is not surprising. Although self-proclaimed

internationalists, the sailors showed little concern for the

worldwide revolutionary movement. Their talk, rather, cen

tered on the Russian people and their destiny, and their

theme of a "third revolution" bears a messianic quality akin

to the "third Rome" doctrine of sixteenth-century Muscovy :

"The autocracy has fallen. The Constituent Assembly has de

parted to the region of the damned. The commiss arocracy is

crumbling. The time has come for the true power of the

toilers, the power of the soviets."32 At times, however, their

peasant n ativism was curiously mingled with elements from

the European revolutionary tradition, as when an Orthodox

funeral ceremony for the fallen rebels, performed in the Sea

men's Cathedral on Anchor Square, ended with the strains

of the "Marseillaise."33 But the popUlist character of the move-

32 Pravda 0 Kronshtadte, p. 1 28. The "third Rome" doctrine pro

claimed : "Two Romes have fallen, but the third stands, and a fourth there will not be."

33 Petrichenko, Pravda 0 Kronshtadtskikh sobytiiakh, p. 1 8 .

1 73


ment predom in ated , m anifesting itself not only in the re

ligious services of the participants and in their social creed,

but also in the traditional folk myths which run like scarlet

threads through the ideological fabric of the rebell ion.

One such myth, deeply embedded in peasant psychology,

was that of the centralized state as an artificial body forcibly

grafted upon Russian society, an alien growth weighing heav

ily on the people and responsible for their suffering. Popular

hatred for the government and its functionaries had deep

roots in Russian history, dating back to the Cossack and

peasant revolts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries . 34

For Stenka Razin and Pugachev the ruling gentry did not be

long to the Russian folk, the narod, but formed a class apart,

a breed of parasites sucking the blood of the peasants. Theirs

was a Manichaean vision in which the forces of good, em

bodied in the common people, were pitted against the forces

of evil, embodied in the state and its officials . The sailors of

Kron stadt were direct descendants of these primitive rebels,

heirs to the tradition of spontaneous revolt ( b untarstvo )

against bureaucratic despotism . They were as ready to fight

the "commissars and bureaucrats" as Razin and Pugachev

had been to fight the "boyars and officials ." The misdeeds

of the nobility became the misdeeds of the new ruling stratum ,

the Communist party, to which all popular misfortunes

from famine and civil war to slavery and exploitation-were

attributed.

This age-old sense of alienation from state officialdom was

succinctly expressed in the title of a rebel editorial , "We and

They," published imm ediately after the first Bolshevik as

sault across the ice. It was also expressed in the term "com

missarocracy," the sailors' favorite epithet for the Soviet

regime : "Lenin said, 'Communism is Soviet power plus

electrification.' But the people are convinced that the Bolshe-

34 These myths will be treated at length in a separate work, Rus

sian Rebels, 1 600-1800, now in progress.

1 74


vik form of Communism is commis sarocracy plus firing

squads ."::: ;; Bolshevik officialdom was assailed as a new privi

leged caste of self-seekers who enjoyed higher pay, l arger

food rations, and warmer living qu arters than the rest of the

people. Recall the attacks on Kalinin , who was driven from

Anchor Squ are with shouts of "You manage to keep w arm

enough" and "Look at all the jobs you've got-I'll bet they

bring you plenty." Again and again the party official s were

accused of stealing the fruits of the revolution and imposing

a new form of siavery over the "body and soul" of Russia.

"Such is the shining kingdom of socialism to which the dic

tatorship of the Communist party has brought us," com

plained the last number of the rebel Izvestiia. "We have ob

tained state socialism with soviets of functionaries who vote

obediently according to the dictates of the party committee

and its infallible commissars. The slogan 'He who does not

work shall not eat' has been twisted by the new 'soviet' order

into 'Everything for the commissars . ' For the workers and

peasants and laboring intelligentsia there rem ains only cheer

less and unremitting toil in a prison environment ."3 6

Not unexpectedly, the principal targets of Kronstadt's

wrath were Zinoviev and Trotsky, who "sit in their soft arm

chairs in the lighted rooms of tsarist palaces and consider

how best to spill the blood of the insurgents. " 3 7 Zinoviev in

curred the sailors' loathin g as the party boss of Petro grad

who had s uppressed the striking workers and who now

stooped to taking their own families as hostages . But the

bete noire of rebel fury was Trotsky. Commissar for War and

chairman of the Revolution ary War Council, Trotsky was re

sponsible for the h arsh ultim atum of March 5 and for order

ing the attack which followed three days later. A whole ar-

3 ;:; Prm'da 0 Krollsh tadte, pp. 79-80, 90. For Lenin's speech ( to the

Ei:::hth Cor.gress of Soviets ) see Vos'moi vserossiis/.:.ii s"ezd sovetov,

p. 3 0 .

3 6 Prm'da 0 Krollslz tadte, p p . 1 7 2-74.

3 7 Ibid., p . 106.

1 75


senal of epithets was aimed at him : "bloody Field Marshal

Trotsky," "this reincarnation of Trepov," "Maliuta Skura

tov . . . head of the Communist oprichnina," "the · evil genius

of Russia" who "like a hawk swoops down on our heroic

city," a monster of tyranny "standing knee-deep in the blood

of the workers." "Listen Trotsky," declared the Kronstadt

I zvestiia on March 9, "the leaders of the Third Revolution

are defending the true power of the soviets against the out

rages of the commissars. "38

The rebels, true to their populist mentality, drew a sharp

line between Trotsky and Zinoviev on the one hand and

Lenin on the other-between the traitorous boyars and the

tsar from whom they concealed the people's suffering. Tradi

tionally, the Russian lower classes had turned their anger not

against the ruler himself, whom they venerated as their

anointed father, but against his corrupt and scheming ad

visors, in whom they saw the embodi!TIent of all that was

pernicious and evil. It was not the remote autocrat who op

pressed the poor : "God is high in the heavens," went the old

proverb, "and the tsar is far away." Rather, it was the land

lord and official on the spot who fleeced the peasants and

townsfolk, keeping them in misery and degradation.

Interestingly enough, Lenin's behavior in the Kronstadt re

bellion tended to support tbis image. During the first week,

while Trotsky and Zinoviev were on the scene in Petro grad,

issuing threats and preparing an offensive against the in

surgents, Lenin remained in Moscow, involving himself only

to the extent of signing the order of March 2 which outlawed

Kozlovsky and his alleged accomplices. Not once was his

name mentioned in the Kronstadt newspaper, which, in char

acteristic language, was busy denouncing the "gendarmes"

3 8 Ibid., pp. 80-82, 9 1 , 1 20. Trepov was a notorious chief of police under Nicholas II. Maliuta Skuratov was the murderous head of

Ivan the Terrible's secret police, the oprichniki, who conducted a

reign of terror in the sixteenth century.

1 76


Trotsky and Zinoviev for "concealing the truth" from the

people. 39 On March 8, however, at the opening session of

the Tenth Party Congress, Lenin emerged from the back

ground and condemned the revolt as the work of White Guard

generals and of petty-bourgeois elements of the population.

After this speech the Kronstadt Revolutionary Committee

criticized him for the first time. The peasants and workers,

said the rebel Izvestiia, had "never believed a word of Trot

sky and Zinoviev" but had not expected Lenin to associate

himself with their "hypocrisy." A poem in Izvestiia wryly

spoke of him as "Tsar Lenin," and the jounlal now de

nounced "the finn of Lenin, Trotsky, and Co." where earlier

it had spoken only of "bloodthirsty Trotsky and CO."40

Yet even now Lenin was treated with a degree of sympathy

which set him apart from his associates. According to the

rebel Izvestiia of March 1 4 , Lenin had told his colleagues

during a recent discussion of the trade union question : "All

of this bores me to death . Even without my illness I would

be glad to throw it all up and flee no matter where ." "But,"

commented Izvestiia, "Lenin's cohorts would not let him flee.

He is their prisoner, and he must utter slanders just �as they

do."41 Here, in purest form, we have the ancient legend of

the benevolent tsar as a helpless captive of his treacherous

boyars. Lenin continued to be venerated as something of a

father-figure. Accordingly, when portraits of Trotsky and

other Bolshevik leaders were tom from Kronstadt's office

walls, those of Lenin were allowed to remain.4 ::! The same

attitude persisted even after the rebellion had been drowned

in blood. In a Finnish internment camp, Yakovenko, deputy

chairman of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee, dis-

39 Ibid. , p. 1 58.

40 Ibid. , pp. 89, 1 62, 1 79 .

41 Ibid., pp. 1 50-52. Cf. Katkov, "The Kronstadt Rising," St. A ntony's Papers, No. 6, pp. 49-50.

42 Za Narodnoe Delo, M arch 17, 1 92 1 ; Novaia Russkaia Zhizn',

M arch 19, 1 92 1 .

1 77


tinguished sharply between Lenin and his colleagues. A

bearded sailor, tall and powerfully built, Yakovenko had

fought on the Bolshevik side in the October Revolution and

was incensed at the party's betrayal of its ideals and prom

ises. His face red with anger, he lashed out at "murderer

Trotsky" and "scoundrel Zinoviev." "I respect Lenin," he

said. "But Trotsky and Zinoviev pull him along with them.

I'd like to take care of those two with my own hands."43

Trotsky in particular was the living symbol of War Com

munism, of everything the sailors had rebelled against. His

name was associated with centralization and militarization,

with iron discipline and regimentation. On the trade union

question he had taken a hard and dogmatic line, in contrast

to Lenin's tactful and conciliatory approach. He had small

regard for the peasantry as a revolutionary force, while Lenin

had always realized that the cooperation of the rural popu

lation was essential if power were to be won and maintained,

an attitude which his orthodox contemporaries scorned as a

survival of the Narodnik heresy. Where Trotsky was intoler

ant, flamboyant, and supercilious, where he exhibited what

Lenin in his famous "TestaIP.ent" was to call a "too far

reaching self-confidence ." Lenin himself was esteemed for

his simple habits of life and lack of personal pretension .

Lenin, moreover, was ' a Great Russian from the middle

Volga, the heart of peasant Russia. Frugal, unostentatious,

austere, he was looked upon as a simple son of Russia who

shared the people's anxieties and was accessible to them in

their time of suffering. Trotsky and Zinoviev, by contrast,

were of Jewish origin and identified with the internationalist

wing of the Communist movement rather than with Russia

itself. Zinoviev, in fact, was president of the Com intern. And

Trotsky, according to the Kronstadt Revolutionary Commit

tee, was responsible during the Civil War for the death of

thousands of innocent people "of a nationality different from

43 Revoliutsiollllaia R ossiia, 1 92 1 , No. 8, p. 6.

1 78

THE KRONST A.DT PROGRA.M

his own ." 44 Although the rebels, in the same breath, denied

any anti-Semitic prej udice, there is no question that feelings

against the Jews ran high am ong the Baltic sailors, m any of

whom came from the Ukraine and the western borderlands,

the classic regions of v irulent anti-Semitism in Russia. For

men of their peas ant and working-class background, the Jews

were a customary scapegoat in times of hardship and distress.

Traditional n ativism , moreover, led them to distrust "alien"

elements in their m idst, and, the revolution having eliminated

the landlords and capitalists, their hostility was now d irected

against the Communists and Jews, whom they tended to

identify with one another.

The sailors, incidentally, were well aware of Trotsky's

and Zinoviev's Jewish origins, if only from the flood of anti

Semitic propaganda released by the Whites during the Civil

War in an effort to l ink Communism with a Jewish conspiracy.

"Bronstein ( Trotsky ) , Apfelbaum ( Zinoviev ) , Rosenfeld

( Kamenev ) , Steinberg-all of them are alike unto thousands

of other true sons of Israel ," ran a White leaflet accusing the

Jewish Bolsheviks of plotting to take over the worldY That

fantasies like this circulated within the Baltic Fleet is evident

from the memoirs of a seaman stationed at the Petrograd n aval

base at the time of the Kronstadt rising.46 In a particularly

vicious passage he attacks the Bolshevik regime as the "first

Jewish Republic" ; and the "wicked boyar" theme, so promi

nent in Russian popular m yth , clearly emer3es when he

labels the Jews a new "privileged class," a class of "Soviet

princes." The author reserves his worst venom for Trotsky

and Zinoviev ( or Bronstein and Apfelbaum, as he often re

fers to them ) , calling the government ultimatum to Kronstadt

"the ultimatum of the Jew Trotsky. " These sentiments, he

44 "Inte rv'iu s chIen ami Vremennogo Revoliutsionnogo Komiteta." m anuscript, Hoover Library.

4" Norman Cohn, Warran t jor Gcnocide, Lond on. 1 967. p. 1 20 .

4 6 "K vospominaniiam matrosa sluzhby 1 9 1 4 god a," manuscript, Columbia Russian A rchive.

1 79


asserts� were widely shared by his fellow sailors, who were

convinced that the Jews and not the Russian peasants and

workers were the real beneficiaries of the revolution : Jews

held the leading posts within the Communist party and

Soviet state ; they infested every government office, especially

the Food Commissariat, seeing to it that their fellow Jews

did not go hungry; and even the roadblock detachments

that hated institution-though 90 percent manned by true

Russians, were almost always commanded by Jews. Such be

liefs, no doubt, were as prevalent in Kronstadt as in Petro

grad, if not more so. Witness the appeal of Vershinin, a mem

ber of the Revolutionary Committee, when he came out on

the ice on March 8 to parley with a Soviet detachment :

"Enough of your 'hoorahs,' and join with us to beat the Jews.

It's their cursed domination that we workers and peasants

have had to endure."47

AL THOUGH the rebels had only contempt for Communist of

ficialdom, they were not hostile towards the rank and file of

the party or to the ideals of Communism as such. True, some

of the members of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee,

when interviewed afterwards in Finland, spoke with bitter

ness of the Communists who "took away the people's

rights. "48 But their antagonism had been sharpened by the

bloody suppression of the revolt, and in any case they had

the party's leadership in mind rather than its ordinary adher

ents. Indeed, more than a few insurgents, including Petri

chenko and Kilgast, the chairman and secretary of the Revo

lutionary Committee, were themselves former Communists

who felt that the ideals of the revolution had been contami

nated and who were bent on restoring their original purity.

Characteristic of their thought was the assertion of one

sailor, still a party member, that Russia had been transformed

47 Komatovskii, ed. , Kronshtadtskii miatezh, pp. 95-96.

48 R evoliutsionnaia R ossiia, 1 92 1 , No. 8, pp. 6-8.

1 80


into a "frightful swamp" by a "tiny circle of Communist

bureaucrats, who, beneath the Communist mask, have built

themselves a cozy nest in our republic."49

For all their animosity towards the Bolshevik hierarchy,

the sailors never called for the disbandment of the party or

its exclusion from a role in Russian government and society.

"Soviets without Communists" was not, as is often maintained

by both Soviet and non-Soviet writers, a Kronstadt slogan.

Such a slogan did exist: it had been trumpeted by peasant

bands in Siberia during the Civil \Var, and Makhno's partisans

in the south had similarly declared themselves "For the soviets

but against the Communists."50 But the sailors never appro

priated these watchwords. That they did so is a legend which

seems to have originated with the exiled Kadet leader Miliu

kov, who in Paris summed up the aims of the insurgents in

the slogans "Soviets instead of Bolsheviks" (Sovety vmesto

Bol'sheviko v ) and "Down with the Bolsheviks, long live _the

soviets." The sailors, he wrote, wanted power to pass from

the existing one-party dictatorship to a coalition of socialists

and nonparty radicals, acting through soviets from which the

Communists had been banished. Such an arrangement, he

said, would leave ample room for a restoration of the Con

stituent Assembly on the national level. ::;1 This, however, was

a far from accurate description of the Kronstadt program,

which explicitly rejected the Constituent Assembly and which

did allow a place for the Bolsheviks in the soviets, alongside

the other left-wing political organizations. In practice, it is

true, Communists were excluded from the local revtroiki

established during the insurrection, but they participated in

strength in the elected conference of delegates, which was

the closest thing Kronstadt ever had to the free soviets of its

dreams.

49 Pravda 0 Kroflshtadte, p _ 66_

50 Trifonov, Klassy i klassO l'oia bor'ba v SSSR, pp. 1 06- 1 07 . 51 Poslednie Novosti, March 1 1 , 1 92 1 .

1 81


The object of the insurgents, then, was not to eliminate

Communism outright, but to reform it, to purge it of the

dictatorial and bureaucratic tendencies which had been

thrown into relief during the Civil War. In this respect, Kron

stadt resembled the opposition movements within the party

-the "fleet opposition," the Democratic Centralists, and the

Workers' Opposition-with which it shared similar discon

tents and a similar outlook of left-wing idealism. Like the

"fleet opposition," to which some of them had undoubtedly

belonged, the rebels objected to the heavy-handed and arbi

trary methods of the political commissars in their midst. Like

the Democratic Centralists, they opposed the increasing au

thoritarianism of the Bolshevik leadership and called for

"democratization" both of the party and of the soviets. And

like the Workers' Opposition, they protested against the

"militarization" of labor, a term embracing one-man manage

ment and iron discipline in the factories, the subjugation of

the trade unions, and the return of "bourgeois specialists" to

their former position of authority. Finally, in common with

all the opposition groups, the Kronstadters deplored the

growing isolation of the party from the people and attacked

the Bolshevik leaders for violating the essential spirit of the

revolution-for sacrificing its democratic and egalitarian

ideals on the altar of power and expediency. 52

These parallels, however, must not be pushed too far. For

one thing, where the rebels displayed a close affinity for the

peasantry, both the Workers' Opposition and the Democratic

centralists were urban groups made up of factory workers

and intellectuals who paid little attention to the needs of the

peasants. Even more important, in sharp contrast to the

rebels, they sought to preserve the Bolshevik monopoly of

power, condoning the use of terror wherever necessary to

accomplish this. They limited their demands to internal party

52 Cf. Daniels, The Conscience of the R evolution, pp. 1 45-46; and Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist A utocracy, pp. 305-3 06.

182


reform, and never advocated sharing political authority with

the other socialist organizations. Still, the points of similarity

between the Kronstadt program and their own were a source

of embarrassment to the opposition leaders, and they bent

over backwards to dissociate themselves from the mutineers.

This was particularly true of the Workers' Opposition, whose

spokesmen at the Tenth Party Congress, Shliapnikov and

Kollontai, angrily disavowed any connection with the upris

ing and attributed it to the influence of "petty-bourgeois

anarchist spontaneity," echoing Lenin's remarks at the open

ing session. Challenged from the floor, Kollontai declared

that the Workers' Oppositionists were among the first volun

teers to go to the front and fight the rebels. 53 A third leader,

Yuri Lutovinov, was in Berlin at the time of the revolt,

serving as deputy chief of the Soviet trade delegation. In a

public interview he denounced the insurgents, repeating the

official story of a White Guard plot assisted by Menshevik

and SR counterrevolutionaries. If the government had de

layed using force to crush the rebellion, he said, it was only

to spare the civilian population of the city, but "the liquida

tion of the Kronstadt adventure is a matter of an extremely

short time. " 5 4

Meanwhile, in Kronstadt itself, the local Communist or

ganization had been infected by the virus of opposition. The

rebellion, as Trotsky admitted, "attracted into its ranks no

small number of Bolsheviks," some for fear of reprisal but

most out of genuine sympathy with the rebel program . More

precisely, Trotsky estimated that 30 percent of the Kronstadt

Communists took an active part in the revolt while 40 percent

occupied a "neutral position."55 This, of course, was merely

the climax of a great wave of defections which had reduced

53 Desiatyi s"ezd R KP( b ) , pp. 72, 300.

54 "Beseda s Iu. Kh. Lutovinovym ," Novyi Mir, March 1 3 , 1 92 1 .

5 5 Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betray ed, New York, 1 937, p. 9 6 ; D esiatyi s"ezd RKP( b ) , p . 2 5 3 .

1 83


party membership from 4,000 to 2,000 between September

1920 and March 1921, a dramatic index of the rebellious

mood which had set in at the end of the Civil War. During

the course of the uprising what remained of the Kronstadt

party organization quickly fell to pieces : some 500 members

resigned, not to mention nearly 300 candidates, while the

remainder, as one of them testified, were badly demoralized

and responded to the revolt with wavering and indecision. 56

The rising tide of disaffection was reflected in the long

lists of resignations from the party, published from time to

time in the Kronstadt lzvestiia. In two issues alone more than

200 names filled the journal's columns. A leading cause of

these defections was the Bolshevik assault of March 7 to 8.

"I shudder to think," wrote a Kronstadt schoolmistress after

the first bombardment, "that I may be considered an accom

plice in spilling the blood of innocent victims. I feel that I

can no longer believe in and propagate that which has dis

graced itself by this savage act. Therefore, with the first shot,

I have ceased to regard myself as a candidate member of the

Communist party."57 Thereafter, the heavier the cannonade

from the Bolshevik forts on the mainland, the greater the

exodus of party members in Kronstadt. Each day the pages

of the rebel lzvestiia carried letters from local Communist

groups, condemning the government for its use of violence

and endorsing the countermeasures of the Revolutionary

Committee. Those who publicly announced their withdrawal

from the party did not renounce the ideals of Communism

but attacked the party's leaders for perverting those ideals

for their own interests. A Kronstadt schoolmaster, for ex

ample, decried the influx of careerists into the party who had

"sullied with filth the beautiful idea of Communism."58 An

other letter came from a Red Commander in the Kronstadt

56 Komatovskii, ed., Kronshtadtskii miatezh, pp. 1 3 - 1 5, 86; Pukhov, Kronshtadtskii miatezh, pp. 50, 95.

117 Pravda 0 Kronshtadte, p. 1 08.

5s lbid., p. 1 3 3 .

184


garrison, the son of a Populist who had been condemned to

exile in the celebrated "Trial of the 193" during the 1 870's.

"I have come to realize," he wrote, "that the policies of the

Communist party have led the country into a blind alley

from which there is no exit. The party has become bureauc

ratized. . . . It refuses to listen to the voice of the masses, on

whom it wishes to impose its will. . . . Only freedom of

speech and greater opportunity to participate in the recon

struction of the country by means of revised election pro

cedures can bring our country out of its lethargy . . . . I refuse

henceforth to consider myself a member of the Russian Com

munist party. I wholly approve of the resolution passed by

the citywide meeting on March 1 , and I hereby place my

energies and abilities [at the disposal of the Revolutionary

Committee] . " 59

Throughout the rebellion there was no serious opposition

from the Kronstadt Communist organization. On March 2

a band of party loyalists, some 200 strong, met at the Higher

Party School and armed themselves against the rebels but

soon decided that the situation was hopeless and fled across

the ice to Krasnaya Gorka. 60 During the early stages other

party stalwarts quit the island for the mainland or went to

the surrounding forts in a vain attempt to rouse them against

the insurgents. Meanwhile, the Revolutionary Committee be

gan to take the principal Bolshevik leaders into custody. The

first to be arrested-at the March 2 conference in the House

of Education-were Kuzmin, commissar of the fleet ; Vasiliev,

chairman of the defunct Soviet ; and Korshunov, commissar

of the Kronstadt battleship squadron. The following day E. I.

Batis, head of Pubalt, was seized by a rebel patrol while

making his way across the ice to Fort Totleben. 61 Among the

59 Ibid., p. 59. 60 Kornatovskii, ed. , Krollshtadtskii miatezh, p. 3 1 ; Petrichenko,

Pravda 0 Kronshtadtskikh sobytiiaklz, p. 8. 6 1 Pravda 0 Kronshtadte, p. 58.

1 85


others to be imprisoned was Dr. L. A. Bregman, a veteran

Kronstadt Bolshevik and secretary of the district party com

mittee.

A number of officials avoided arrest by collaborating with

the rebels. On March 2 a "Provisional Bureau of the Kron

stadt Organization of the Russian Communist Party" was

formed by three local Bolsheviks, la. Ilyin, the commissar

of food supply, F. Pervushin, a former leader of the Soviet,

and A. Kabanov, chairman of Kronstadt's Trade Union

Council. The Bureau issued a declaration on March 4, recog

nizing the need for new elections to the soviets and calling

on all Kronstadt Communists to remain on the job and obey

the orders of the Revolutionary Committee. It warned, more

over, against "malicious rumors," concocted by Entente

agents, to the effect that Communists were preparing to over

throw the rebellion or, on the other hand, that party mem

bers would be shot by the insurgents. 62 Ilyin's cooperation,

as it turned out, was a deception, an effort to gain time un

til help could come from the mainland. On the sly, he was

telephoning reports on Kronstadt's food supply to his supe

riors at Krasnaya Gorka. The ruse, however, was soon dis

covered. Ilyin was arrested and his Bureau apparently dis

solved, for nothing more is heard of it in the remaining days

of the revolt. 63

All told, some 300 Communists were arrested during the

course of the insurrection, most of them local officials, to

gether with a few caught trying to flee or otherwise considered

dangerous by the Revolutionary Committee. \Vhile this was

by no means a trifling figure, representing as it did about a

fifth of the total membership in Kronstadt, it is remarkable

that so many were left free and unmolested when the author

ities, for their part, had executed forty-five seamen at Or ani-

62 I bid., pp. 50-5 1 .

6 3 Ibid., p. 1 30 ; Komatovskii, ed. , Kronshtadtskii miatezh, p. 228; Krasnaia Gazeta, March 1 8, 1 92 1 .

1 86


enbaum and taken the relatives of the Kronstadters hostage.

Perhaps the latter move, while arousing the fury of the in

surgents, tempered their behavior by raising the prospect of

retaliation. At any rate, Kronstadt was noteworthy for its

humane treatment of its adversaries during a period of high

emotion and growing tension. No harm whatever came to

the 300 Bolshevik prisoners ; there were no executions, no

tortures, no beatings. The revolt, after all, was not against

the Whites, whom the sailors passionately hated and would

have slaughtered without the slightest remorse, but against

fellow revolutionaries whose ideals they shared and whose

practices they were merely seeking to reform. One may won

der, however, about the fate of a Trotsky or a Zinoviev had

they fallen into the rebels' hands.

In any case, even the most unpopular officials emerged un

scathed. Reports that Kuzmin had been brutally handled and

had barely escaped summary execution lacked any basis in

truth. Victor Serge ran into him at Smolny after the revolt,

and Kuzmin, looking hale and hearty, confessed that such

stories were mere "exaggerations," that he and his comrades

had been treated correctly. Ilyin was also spared, though

Petrichenko was incensed at his treachery.64 And when the

Revolutionary Committee heard that relatives of Communists

were being boycotted or dismissed from their jobs, it cau

tioned the population against vengeful behavior : "In spite

of all the outrageous acts of the Communists, we shall have

enough restraint to confine ourselves only to isolating them

from public life so that their malicious and false agitation

will not hinder our revolutionary work."65

Nevertheless, the fate of the prisoners aroused no little

64 Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, pp. 1 26-27 ; Pravda 0 Kronshtadte, p. 1 30.

65 Pravda 0 Kronshtadte, pp. 75, 84. On the relations between the

rebels and the local Communists, see Katkov, "The Kronstadt Rising," St. AntollY's Papers, No. 6 , pp. 45-48.

187


concern within the Bolshevik government. After the first wave of arrests, the authorities responded by taking hostages and warning that any harm to the Communists would have grave consequences. The prisoners themselves, by their own testimony, lived in constant fear of being shot.66 Nor was their situation improved when 50 Communists at Fort Krasnoarmeets made a break for the Karelian coast and were intercepted. On other occasions loyalists signaled to the shore with flashlights and fired flares to illuminate targets at night. As a result, especially after the March 8 attack, the rebels began to deal more strictly with the Bolsheviks in their midst.

On March 1 0 all Communists were ordered to turn in their arms and flashlights. Soon after this, the Revolutionary Committee told the population to look out for traitors signaling to the enemy. "Justice will be meted out on the spot," warned Izvestiia, "without any court, according to the laws dictated by the moment." There were cases of minor harassment, for example when two party members were accused of hoarding food; and at the March 1 1 conference of delegates, it was re

vealed that 280 pairs of boots had been taken from the Bolshevik prisoners for the use of the defenders stationed on the ice, the owners being provided with bast sandals in return. The announcement was greeted with applause and shouts of "Quite right! Take their coats too!" And this apparently was done, for one captive later testified that both his overcoat and boots had been confiscated.67

"OUR REVOLT is an elemental movement to get rid of Bolshevik oppression; once that is done, the wi1l of the people will manifest itself." Thus did Petrichenko, in an interview with an American journalist in Finland, characterize the

66 See the interview with V asiliev in Krasllaia Gazeta, March 1 8, 1 92 1 .

67 Pravda 0 Kronshtadte, pp. 96, 1 0 1 , 122, 1 3 0, 1 3 8, 156; Pukhov, Kronshtadtskii miatezh, p. 9 9 ; Korn atovskii, ed . , Kronshtadtskii miatezh, p. 77.

188


March uprising.68 In a single sentence he conveyed the spirit

of the rebellion, for the distinguishing feature of Kronstadt

was its spontaneity, a feature it shared with the peasant in

surrections and worker disturbances of the same period. Re

garded as a single phenomenon, these movements consti

tuted a revolt of the masses in the tradition of Razin and

Pugachev, with the sailors filling the role of the Cossacks

and strel'tsy, whose proclivity for sudden outbursts against

organized despotism they had inherited in full measure. This

same tradition had also expressed itself in 1 9 1 7, a new edi

tion of the classic "Russian revolt, blind and pitiless," as

Pushkin described the Pugachevshchina of the eighteenth

century. For the anarchists , Maximalists , and other left-wing

extremists, the "social revolution" had arrived at last. They

threw in their lot with the Bolsheviks, whose slogans, some

of them borrowed from the syndicalists and SR's, suited their

own mood and aspirations. "Land to the peasants! Down with

the Provisional Government! Control of the factories to the

workers!" As a revolutionary program, this was closer to

narodnichestvo than to Marxism , and had strong appeal to

the anarcho-populist instincts of the untutored elements of

the Russian population. After October, however , Lenin and his party, bent on con

solidating their power and rescuing the country from social

chaos , tried to divert the revolution from below into central

ist and authoritarian channels. Their efforts ran contrary to

the urges of the peasantry and working class , for whom the

revolution was the very negation of centralization and au

thoritarianism. What the people clearly wanted was a de

centralized society founded on local initiative and self-deter

mination. To be left alone by the government and its agents ,

after all , had been the perennial dream of the lower classes.

Thus it was not for nothing that the peasants distinguished

68 Quarton to Secretary of State, April 9, 1921, National Archives, 861.00/ 8470.

189


between the "Bolsheviks," who eliminated the nobles and

gave them the land , and the "Communists ," who established

state farms and sent requisitioning teams into the country

side; in 1 9 1 7 the Bolsheviks promised an anarcho-populist

millennium but once in power reverted to their original

statist axioms.

There were , broadly speaking , two fundamentally op

posed trends within the Russian revolutionary tradition. One

was the centralist trend , represented by Lenin and his party

and aiming to replace the old order with a revolutionary dic

tatorship; the other , pursued by the anarchists and SR's ,

was towards decentralized self-rule , the absence of strong

governmental authority , and trust in the democratic instincts

of the people. Kronstadt , with its roots in peasant particu

larism and spontaneous rebellion , belonged squarely in the

second category. Opponents of centralized despotism in all

its forms , the sailors turned against their former Bolshevik

allies and their elitist brand of state socialism. They went

so far , indeed , as to deny that the Bolshevik program was

socialism at all. For the rebels , as for Bakunin before them ,

socialism without personal liberty and self -determination

for the lower classes at least-was nothing but a new form

of tyranny , worse in some ways than the one it had replaced.

It was this divergence of outlook that lay at the root of the

conflict of March 192 1. An essential feature of Bolshevism

was its distrust of mass spontaneity. Lenin believed that , left

to their own devices , the workers and peasants would either

content themselves with partial reforms or , worse still , fall

victim to the forces of reaction. In his view, therefore , the

masses must be led "from without ," by a dedicated revolu

tionary vanguard . This was a basic tenet of his political phi

losophy , and he applied it to the situation in Kronstadt. We

must weigh with care, he told the Tenth Party Congress, the

political and economic lessons of this event. "What does it

signify? The transfer of political authority to some nondescript

190


conglomeration or alliance of ill-assorted elements , gIVlllg

the appearance of being just a bit to the right of the Bolshe

viks , or perhaps even to the left of the Bolsheviks-one can

not tell , so amorphous is that combination of political groups

which in Kronstadt are attempting to take power in their

own hands." Although he blamed the revolt on a White

Guard plot , he was fully alive to its true significance. The

movement , he said , was a counterrevolution of "petty-bour

geois anarchistic spontaneity ," that is , a mass revolt closely

linked to the peasant and worker unrest of the same moment.

As such , it was extremely dangerous to the survival of Bol

shevism , more dangerous than Denikin , Ko1chak , and Yu

denich put together.69

More than anything else , Lenin feared the outbreak of a

new Pugachevshchina. He feared that the same anarcho

populist tide which had carried the Bolsheviks to power would

now engulf them. What made the sailors particularly danger

ous was the fact that , in contrast to the Whites , they had re

volted in the name of the soviets. The rebels , as Victor Serge

remarked , belonged body' and soul to the revolution.70 They

voiced the suffering and will of the people , and thus pricked

the conscience of the Bolshevik leadership more than any

other opposition movement could. Lenin understood the mass

appeal of the rebellion. He attacked it as "petty bourgeois"

and "semi-anarchist" in the same way that he had attacked

the Populists a quarter-century earlier for their romantic

dream of a bygone era of communes and handicrafts coop

eratives. Such a vision was anathema to the Bolshevik tem

perament; it was not merely primitive and inefficient but re

actionary as well , and could not survive in the twentieth cen-

69 Desiatyi s"ezd RKP ( b ) , pp. 3 3- 3 4. On another occasion Lenin sought to minimize the d angers of Kronstadt, saying that it posed a "smaller threat to Soviet power than the Irish Ar my to the British Empire." Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, XLIII, 1 29 .

70 Ser ge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, p. 1 3 1 .

191


tury, when the centralized state and the centralized industrial

machine were everywhere triumphant.

This is why, for Lenin, Kronstadt was more hazardous than

the White armies of the Civil War. It stood for an ideal

which, however unattainable, corresponded to the deepest

urges of the Russian lower classes. But if Kronstadt had its

way, Lenin reasoned, it would mean the end of all authority

and cohesion and the breakup of the country into a thousand

separate fragments, another period of chaos and. atomization

like 19 17, but this time directed against the new order. Before

long, some other centralized regime--of the Right rather

than the Left-would fill the vacuum, for Russia could not

endure in a state of anarchy. Thus for Lenin the course was

clear: whatever the cost, the rebels must be crushed and Bol

shevism restored in Kronstadt.

192

6. Suppression

On March 9, the day after the abortive assault on the rebel

stronghold, the Bolshevik leader Kamenev addressed the

Tenth Party Congress in Moscow. The military situation in

Kronstadt, he said, had become "more protracted" than any

one had expected, so that the liquidation of the mutiny would

not be accomplished "at an early hour."l The first attack

had been premature. In their anxiety to crush the rebellion

before it could receive outside help or spread to the main

land, the authorities had acted too hastily, making faulty

preparations and using an insufficient quantity of troops and

equipment, with the result that the assault was repulsed with

heavy losses.

But now time was even more pressing, for before long the

ice would begin to melt. Thus Tukhachevsky, the Bolshevik

commander, urgently prepared for a second attack in much

greater strength than before. Artillery and aircraft were

rushed to the theater of operations. On both coasts facing

Kotlin Island a rapid buildup took place, with fresh troops

pouring in from all parts of the country. Low morale having

played a part in the disaster of March 8, the men were chosen

with particular care. Whole battalions of military cadets and

Young Communists arrived from towns as remote as Smo

lensk and Vitebsk, Riazan and Nizhni Novgorod, singing the

"Internationale" as a token of their revolutionary fidelity. 2

Picked Communist detachments and special Cheka units

made up a very high proportion of the new assault force.

In addition, loyal regiments were called in from the Ukraine

and from the Polish front, augmented by Chinese, Tatar,

Bashkir, and Lettish troops who might have fewer qualms

than Great Russians about firing on the insurgents. As one

1 Desiatyi s"ezd RKP ( b ) , p. 167. 2 G razhdanskaia voina, 1918-1921, I, 365 ; Pukhov, Kronshtadtskii

m iatezh, p. 1 50; V ogne revoliutsii, Moscow, 193 3 , p. 56 .

193

SUPPRESSION

observer put it, it was the Communists and non-Russians

(inorodtsy) against the people.3

From the General Staff Academy such seasoned military

leaders as Fedko, Uritsky, and Dybenko were summoned to

help direct the assault. Dybenko, himself a former crew mem

ber of the Petropavlovsk and a prominent Bolshevik in the

fleet during the Revolution, addressed a leaflet to his "Old

Comrade Sailors of Kronstadt," denouncing Petrichenko as a

"Poltava kulak" and calling on the rebels to lay down their

arms.4 At the same time, the government did all it could to

convince its troops that the sailors were counterrevolution

aries. The press and radio insisted that the mutineers of

"White Kronstadt?' were acting at the behest of the emigres

and their Allied accomplices. "Damn the Kronstadt traitors,"

ran the headline of one Petrograd journal, "Kronstadt will be

Red."5

Meanwhile, an uneasy calm had settled on the old capital.

To prevent new disturbances from breaking out while final

military preparations were being made, Zinoviev granted fur

ther concessions to the population, promising, among other

things, to summon a citywide conference of nonparty workers

and to curb "bureaucratism" within the party and govern

ment.6 In Moscow the rebellion was a matter of growing con

cern. On March 10 Trotsky returned with a grim report on

the situation and presented it to a closed session of the Tenth

Party Congress. That evening some 300 delegates volunteered

for the front, over a quarter of the total attendance and a dra

matic measure of the gravity with which the rising was viewed

ten days after its outbreak. To prove their loyalty, members

3 Dan, Dva goda skitanii, pp. 154-55; New York Times, M arch 12, 1921; Novaia Russkaia Zhizn', M arch 22, 19M; "Prichiny, pov ody, techenie i otsenka Kronshtadtskikh sobytii," manuscript, Hoover Library.

4 Komatovskii, ed., Kronshtadtskii miatezh, pp. 226-27.

5 Krasnaia Gazeta, March 10, 1921.

6 Petrogradskaia Pravda, M arch 11, 1921.

194

SUPPRESSION

of the Workers' Opposition and Democratic Centralist fac

tions were among the first to step forward.7

One of the volunteers, a Democratic Centralist named M.

A. Rafail, has left an account of the role of the delegates in

the final storming of the fortress. Arriving in Petro grad on

March 1 1, they were hurriedly distributed among the troops

concentrated on the mainland to the north and south of

Kronstadt. Rafail and his party were sent to Oranienbaum,

singing the "Internationale" as they went. 8 Although some

were to take part in the actual fighting, their chief task was

to boost the morale of the soldiers, to overcome their hesi

tancy to fire on the rebels by convincing them that they were

defending the revolution against its enemies. They sought,

moreover, to still the fears of the troops of crossing the open

ice without protection; after the debacle of March 8, the men

were filled with terror at the prospect of being mowed down

by machine guns or of drowning under a hail of cannon

shells. Another function of the delegates was to try to induce

the rebels to give up their struggle. "Free soviets," they de

clared in a leaflet to Kronstadt, would in fact mean a restora

tion of the "bourgeoisie, landlords, generals, admirals, and

noblemen, the princes and other parasites"; the slogan was

merely a smokescreen for "the overthrow of Soviet power,

the power of the exploited, and the restoration of the power

of the capitalist exploiters." So make your choice now :

"either with the White Guards against us, or with us against

the White Guards."9

At first, however, the delegates had little success. The

7 The minutes of the congress contain an incomplete list of 279 volunteers, including such prominent figures as K. E. VoroshiIov, A. S. Bubnov (a Democratic Central ist ) , V. P. Zatonsky, and G . L. Piatakov : Desiatyi s"ezd RKP ( b), pp. 765-67.

8 M. Rafail, Kronshtadtskii miatezh (/z dnel'flika politrabotnika), Kharkov, 192 1 , pp. 4-6. Cf. Pukhov, Krollshtadtskii miatezh, p. 1 52.

9 R abinovich , "Delegaty 1 0- go s"ezd a R KP(b) pod Kronshtadtom," Krasnaia Letopis', 193 1 , No. 2, pp. 50-54.

195

SUPPRESSION

morale of the Communist troops remained weak, while the

spirits of the defenders, on the other hand, showed no sign

of flagging. For this state of affairs Soviet military strategy

was partly to blame : the Bolsheviks, to the surprise of the

American consul in Viborg, had not "learned the futility of

small attacks. "10 On March 9 new probes were launched

across the ice, only to be driven back by the watchful de

fenders. The following day Soviet airplanes bombed the

fortress, and after nightfall the batteries on both sides of the

mainland pounded the rebel defenses with a merciless can

nonade. This was followed, in the early hours of the 11 th, by an invasion attempt from the southern coast, which was

repulsed with heavy casualties. The rest of the day was quiet,

a thick fog having moved in over the Finnish Gulf, preventing

further military operations. Visibility was so poor that a

Communist pilot, flying from Oranienbaum to Petro grad,

mistakenly landed at Kronstadt. Seeing his error, he revved

up his engines and managed to take off amid heavy gunfire,

making it safely to Petrograd.11

Despite these repeated setbacks, the Soviet commanders,

determined to crush the mutiny before the ice broke up,

refused to suspend offensive operations until they were

better prepared. On March 12 the air and artillery bombard

ment was resumed, continuing sporadically throughout the

day but causing only minor damage. According to an emigre

source, one Bolshevik plane was shot down by Kronstadt

ground fire and crashed into the Finnish Gulf,12 the only

loss of its kind during the rebellion. The next morning the

pattern of the past few days was repeated as the bombard

ment was succeeded by a predawn raid from the southern

shore. Though camouflaged in white overalls, the assailants

did not get very far before being driven back by crossfire

10 Quarton to Secretary of State, March 1 1, 192 1, N ational Archives, 86 1 .00/83 1 8 .

1 1 Izvestiia Petrogradskogo Soveta, March 1 1, 1921. 12 Za Narodnoe Delo, March 1 8, 1921.

196

SUPPRESSION

from the outlying rebel forts. But the assaults kept coming.

On the morning of the 14th, under cover of darkness, fresh

Bolshevik detachments advanced into a hurricane of artillery

and machine-gun fire and were forced to withdraw, leaving

scores of dead and wounded on the ice. This, however, was

the last of the small-scale attacks. For the next 72 hoursf

though air and artillery operations continued as before, all

ground activity ceased as the Communists prepared an all

out effort to take the rebel citadel by storm.

ON TOP of their military reverses, the Bolsheviks had other

serious troubles to contend with. It was reported, for exam

ple, that the railway workers at Krasnoe Selo, a junction

southwest of Petrograd, refused to transport troops being

sent against Kronstadt. In another case, a Young Communist

from Moscow noted that his train stopped again and again

during the short trip from Petrograd to Oranienbaum, and

although the engineer complained of bad fuel, the volunteers

suspected foul play.13 Much more serious was an incident on

March 1 6, the very eve of the final assault. At Oranienbaum

riflemen of the 27th Omsk Division, who had distinguished

themselves against the Whites in the Civil War, started a

mutiny with an appeal "to go to Petro grad and beat the

Jews." Loyal troops under I. F. Fedko, one of the military

experts from the General Staff Academy, quickly sealed off

the base, surrounded the barracks of the Omsk mutineers,

and arrested the ringleaders. But the virus of disenchantment

was a potent one, from which not even the reliable kursanty

were immune : at about the same time, an anti-Bolshevik

conspiracy was unearthed among the cadets of the Peterhof

Command School, several of whom were arrested and taken

under guard to Petrograd .14

13 New York Times, March 16, 1 92 1 ; V ogne revoliutsii, p. 58. 14 Kornatovskii, ed., Kronshtadtskii miatezh, pp. 1 00- 1 0 1 ; Pukhov,

Kronshtadtskii miatezh, pp. 1 47-48.

197

SUPPRESSION

Yet, despite these instances of disaffection, a marked im

provement in the morale of the Red forces occurred during

the last two days before the decisive attack. Much of the

credit must go to the delegates from the Tenth Party Con

gress, armed with a powerful new weapon : on :March 15 the

Congress in Moscow voted to replace forced requisitions

with a tax in kind. When Lenin announced the new program

before the assembly, a speaker from Siberia declared that "it

is only necessary to tell all Siberia about this decree in order

to stop the peasant disorders."15 The delegates at the front,

informed of the news, hastened to communicate it to the

troops. The effect was remarkable. All at once, recalled one

Bolshevik commissar, there occurred a "radical change in

the mood" of the soldiers, most of whom were of peasant

background.16 The concession marked the beginning of the

end of War Communism, and its announcement had a deci

sive influence on the performance of the Red forces in the

final battle.

At about this time a shift was also occurring in the mood

at Kronstadt, but in the opposite direction. Until the middle

of March the morale of the rebels ran high, despite the over

whelming odds against them . "Today is the anniversary of

the overthrow of the autocracy and the eve of the fall of

the commissarocracy," boasted the Kronstadt Izvestiia of

March 12.17 A courier from the American consulate in Vi

borg, who visited the fortress that day, took note of the

"good discipline and spirit among the garrison and popula

tion ." And in a similar report an SR correspondent wrote

that complete order and calm prevailed throughout the city

and that workshops remained in operation. "We want to

begin the work of liberating Russia," Petrichenko told him.

15 Desiatyi s"ezd RKP( b), pp. 430, 46 8. 16 Rabinovich, "Delegaty 1 O-go s"ezda RKP(b) pod Kronshtadt

om," Krasnaia Letopis', 193 I, No. 2, p. 3 2 . 17 Pravda 0 Krollshtadte, p. 1 26 .

1 98

SUPPRESSION

"We are striving to draw the population of Petrograd to our

side . . . . We shall achieve the genuine power of the soviets. "18

Kronstadt was still sustained by the belief that its cause was

just and that the revolt would soon spread to the mainland.

On March 1 1 Izvestiia appealed to the rest of Russia to join

the struggle against Bolshevik oppression: " Kronstadt is

fighting for you, the hungry, the cold, the naked . . . . Com

rades, the Kronstadters have raised the banner of rebellion,

and they are confident that tens of millions of workers and

peasants will respond to their call. It cannot be that the

dawning which has begun here should not become a bright

day for the whole of Russia and first of all Petrograd. "19

Meanwhile, the Revolutionary Committee endeavored to

strengthen the island's defenses against the imminent attack.

Lights out was ordered after dark to make things more dif

ficult for the enemy gunners and bombardiers. So far, despite

the intensive bombardment, casualties were remarkably light;

outsiders who visited Kronstadt reported little injury and

only minor damage to buildings and installations. Through

March 10, by the defenders' own reckoning, only 14 persons

had been killed and 4 wounded ( 2 sailors, a soldier, and a

civilian). On March 12 the rebel Izvestiia thought it note

worthy that a 14-year-old boy had been wounded while out

on patrol (nothing could stop him, the journal explained,

for his father, a peasant, had been shot by the Bolsheviks last

year in his village). 20 But matters were taking a turn for the worse. Contrary to

expectations, Petrograd showed little sign of joining the

18 Quarton to Secretary of State, March 13, 1921, N ational Archives, 861.00/8319; London Times, M arch 17,1921; Volia Rossii,

March 15, 1921.

19 Pravda 0 Kronshladte, pp. 120-21.

20 Ibid., pp. 122, 132; New York Times, M arch 16, 1921. Another source puts the n umber of wour.ded from Kronst adt and its forts at 60: "Kak n ach alos' vosstanie v Kronshtadte," M arch 12, 1921, Miller Archives , File SM, No .5 .

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SUPPRESSION

rebellion. A few copies of the Kronstadt I zvestiia were pasted

on factory walls, and on one occasion a truck drove through

the streets of the city scattering leaflets from the rebels. On

March 7 the workers of the Arsenal factory endorsed the

Kronstadt resolution and sent delegates to other enterprises

to urge a general strike in support of the insurgents.21 But

all such efforts came to nothing, and the city, appeased by

concessions and cowed by the presence of troops, remained

quiet. The sailors felt betrayed, a feeling which rankled long

after their movement was subdued. Refugees in Finland later

complained that they had thought the Petrograd workers

"meant business" and that the strikes would develop into

a full-fledged revolution. Similarly, captured sailors whom

Dan encountered in prison accused the workers of selling out

to the government "for a pound of meat."22

No help, in fact, was forthcoming from any quarter. Kron

stadt remained alone and isolated, subject to frequent air

attacks and the pounding of the heavy guns from the main

land. Owing to the nocturnal sallies of Bolshevik raiding

parties, the defenders had to do with little sleep; and, amid

raging snowstorms, rebel patrols walked the ice in sandals for

lack of boots. As fuel supplies dwindled, the Kronstadt

Izvestiia appealed to the besieged population to use electricity

as sparingly as possible. Ammunition was also getting low.

On March 11 the defenders were ordered not to fire at Com

munist airplanes with rifles or machine guns, a futile action

that only wasted precious cartridges. At the same time, the

"military specialists" complained that artillery shells were

being fired indiscriminately over long distances at doubtful

targets. And the number of rebel casualties, though far from

heavy, was mounting steadily. Around the middle of the

month medical supplies ran out, and the death rate increased

21 Mett, La Commune de Cronstadt, p. 46. 22 Quarton to Secretary of State, April 23, 1921, National Archives,

861.00/8619; Dan, Dva goda skitanii, p. 153.

200

SUPPRESSION

sharply. On March 14 collective funeral rites were performed

at the Kronstadt Naval Hospital, and another ceremony took

place in the Seamen's Cathedral on the 16th, as Communist

artillery pounded the city. That evening rebel morale was

badly shaken when a 12-inch shell from Krasnaya Gorka

struck the deck of the Sevastopol, killing 14 seamen and

wounding 36.23

In such circumstances, as a member of the Revolutionary

Committee recalled, it was hopeless to maintain the initial

enthusiasm generated by the revolt. 24 The repeated attacks,

the lack of food and fuel, the long sleepless nights spent on

guard in the cold, as Berkman noted, were sapping the vital

ity of the rebel stronghold. 25 With growing anxiety the de

fenders awaited the assault they knew had to come, and

the strain and suspense began to tell on their nerves. Of

primary concern was the state of Kronstadt's provisions, a

problem which the author of the Secret Memorandum had

foreseen weeks before the rebellion erupted. How long could

the island, cut off from the outside world, feed its 50,000

inhabitants? By the end of the first week the initial daily

ration of a half-pound of bread and a quarter-can of pre

served food could not be maintained. On March 8 each per

son received a small quantity of oats to last four days. On the

9th a quarter-pound of black biscuit made of flour and dried

potatoes was distributed. The following day the Kronstadt

metal workers agreed to place their special allotment of

canned horsemeat at the disposal of the community. Other

than this, during the whole course of the insurrection there

was distributed only one tin of condensed milk per person, an

23 Pravda 0 Kronshtadte, pp. 75, 1 3 8 ; Quarton to Secretary of State, April 2 3 , 1 92 1 , National Archives , 86 1 .00/86 1 9 ; Petrichenko, Pravda 0 Kronshtadtskiklz sobytiiakh, p. 1 8 .

24 "Interv'iu s chien ami V remennogo Revoliutsionnogo Komiteta," manuscript, Hoover L ibrary .

25 Berkman , The Kronstadt Rebellion, p. 3 6 . Cf. Goldman, Living

My Life, p. 884.

201

SUPPRESSION

occasional tin of meat preserves, and, to children only, a halfpound of butter. By March 15 flour was gone and bread all but exhausted, and only a small quantity of canned goods remained on hand.26

The people were hungry, and, as the Petrograd Soviet noted, "hunger is often the main factor in the capitulation of fortresses in wars between peoples."27 Kronstadt's hope that it could hold out alone until the ice melted was fading, and the rebel leaders began to have second thoughts about receiving outside help. Chernov's overtures during the early days of the rising had been politely refused. But when Baron Vilken arrived on March 16 with an offer of food and medicine in the name of the Russian Red Cross, it was gratef1llly accepted.

As WE KNOW, however, no aid ever came. For it was on March 16, too, that Tukhachevsky regrouped his army for the final storming of the rebel bastion. There were two attacking forces, the larger one deployed on the southern shore of the Finnish Gulf, the smaller along the northern or Karelian coastline. The total number of Communist troops has been variously estimated from 35,000 to 75,000 men, pitted against some 15,000 well-entrenched defenders .28 The actual figure was probably around 50,000 ( twice the number used in the first assault of March 8) , of whom some 35,000 made up the Southern Group. Some of the best Bolshevik commanders were on hand to lead the assault. Many had proved their ability in the Civil War, including Fedko and Dybenko

26 Mett, La Commune de Cronstadt. pp. 77-7 8 ; Volia Rossii, March 1 5, 1 92 1 ; "Prichiny, povody, techenie i otsenka Kronshtadtskikh sobytii," manuscript, Hoover Library.

27 lzvestiia Petrogradskogo Soveta, March 1 4, 1 92 1 . 28 New York Times, March 1 8 , 1 92 1; Novaia Russkaia Zhizn',

March 22, 1921 ; "Prichiny, povody, techenie i otsenka Kronshtadtskikh sobytii," Hoover L ibra ry; T seidler to president of Russian Red Cross, March 20, 1 92 1 , Giers Archives, File 88.

202

SUPPRESSION

from the General Staff Academy and Vitovt Putna, who was put in charge of the mutinous 27th Omsk Division. For all the government's accusations that Kronstadt was a conspiracy of White Guard generals, ex-tsarist officers played a much more prominent role in the attacking force than among the defenders. The commanders of the Northern and Southern Groups, E. S. Kazansky and A. I. Sediakin, as well as their superiors, Tukhachevsky and S. S. Kamenev ( no relation to the party leader L. B. Kamenev) , had all been officers in the Imperial Army.

The morale of the rank and file was now much higher than before, owing to their reinforced numerical strength, the outstanding quality of their officers, and the tireless agitation of the party delegates. "We have suffered three years of hunger, lack of fuel, and the like. And now this betraya1. We'll settle their hash!"29 Such was the tone of the Soviet propaganda machine, and it found a response in the new determination of the soldiers to crush the revolt once and for all. The men, outfitted in their white smocks and winter boots, were supplied with ample ammunition and special clippers for the barbed wire protecting Kronstadt's forts and batteries. Each soldier was issued a two-day ration of bread and two tins of preserved meat to forestall any grumbling about food. However, one commander in the Northern Group, in a recommendation hardly calculated to boost morale, advised his men not to eat before going into combat because stomach wounds were more likely to be serious after a mea1. 30

Tukhachevsky's plan called for a prolonged bombardment followed by a concerted infantry assault from three sides, the Northern Group striking at the northern end of Kotlin Island and the Southern Group at the southern and eastern ends. The cannonade began at 2 P.M. on March 16 and continued

29 Krasllaia Cazeta, M arch 17, 192!.

30 Kornatovsk ii, ed., Kronshtadtskii miatezh, p. 89.

203

SUPPRESSION

throughout the day. Shells fell in Kronstadt near the cemetery where burial rites were being performed for the dead defenders. The insurgents replied with a heavy barrage from their forts and batteries and from the two dreadnoughts in the harbor. During the exchange a Communist shell crashed through the deck of the Sevastopol, causing only minor damage to the ship but killing or injuring 50 seamen. To avoid the same fate, the Petropavlovsk sent up a protective smokescreen, but the following day it too was to receive a full hit, killing 5 men and wounding 7.31 In addition to the coastal barrage, aircraft were sent across the Gulf to bomb the fortress and its network of defenses. Yet the combined bombardment from the shore and air caused little physical damage and claimed relatively few rebel casualties. Its main effect was psychological, depressing still further the sinking morale of the defenders.

At nightfall the bombardment ceased. Mindful of the pattern of the past week, the rebels expected an attack to follow. Every man was at his post, though many had gone without relief for two or three days . For a long time there was complete silence, as searchlights from Kronstadt's forts and vessels scanned the ice for signs of movement. Finally, at 3 A.M. on the 17th the advance began. Protected by the dark and by a dense curtain of fog hanging over the Gulf, the Northern Group, made up largely of military cadets from the Petrograd area, proceeded in two columns from Sestroretsk and Lisy Nos, the one against Forts Totleben and

31 Petrichenko, Pravda 0 Kronshtadtskikh sobytiiakh, p. 1 8 ; New

York Times, March 1 9, 1 92 1 . Details of the assault have been gleaned chiefly from contemporary press reports and from the recollections of participants. See especially Kornatovskii, ed., Kron

shtadtskii miatezh, pp. 45-5 1 , 89-9 1 ; Pukhov, Kronshtadtskii miatezh,

pp. 162-70 ; Grazhdanskaia voina, I, 367-7 3 ; Rafail, Kroflshtadtskii

miatezh, pp. 20-26 ; and K. E. V oroshilov, "Iz istorii podavleniia Kronshtadtskogo miatezha," Voenno-lstoricheskii Zlzurnal, 1961, No. 3, pp. 1 5 - 3 5. Unfortunately, I have not been able to locate Voclllloe

Znanie, 1 92 1 , No. 8 , which is devoted to the <;ubject.

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SUPPRESSION

Krasnoarmeets and the other against the seven numbered forts strung out between Kotlin Island and the Karelian mainland. At the head of each column were volunteer shock troops to clear the way for the attack. Every effort was made to avoid detection. Conversation was forbidden, and orders were given in hushed tones. Communication was also achieved by flashlight signals carefully prepared in advance. Otherwise darkness was maintained and smoking prohibited.

At 5 A.M. the left-hand column from Lisy Nos, five battalions strong, sighted Forts 5 and 6, the outermost rebel strongpoints, looming ahead of them. Ordered on all-fours, the men crept the remaining distance along the ice, the water on its surface soaking through their white overalls. They reached the thick barbed wire barrier, and were cutting their way through, when they were suddenly illuminated by rebel flares and searchlights. The light was so intense, one soldier recalled, that "night was transformed into day." Fort 6

shouted for them to surrender. "We are your friends. We are for soviet power. We won't shoot yoU."32 Ignoring these pleas, the kursanty rushed the forts with bayonets and grenades but were driven back with heavy losses by a murderous hail of machine-gun fire. Again and again the cadets, with cries of "Hoorah," returned to the attack, finally breaking through the rebel defenses, and after a fierce struggle the two forts were taken.

During the morning the fog lifted, and March 1 7 became a bright and sunny day. The Communists, now without cover, pressed their attack against the remaining forts. Both sides fought fanatically, suffering heavy loss of life. Shells from the rebel artillery broke up the ice, forming small lakes that became graves for scores of advancing troops. In one Communist battalion, according to S. P. Uritsky, a commander from the General Staff Academy, there were only 18 sur-

32 Kornatovskii , ed. , Kronshtadtskii miatezh, pp. 90, 105 .

205

SUPPRESSION

vivors.33 But resistance was gradually overcome, and by mid-afternoon all the numbered forts had been taken and the kursanty had advanced to the northeast wall of the city of Kronstadt. Meanwhile, the right-hand column, consisting of only two companies, was trying unsuccessfully to capture Fort Totleben. Despite their exhaustion, the defenders fought with savage desperation, beating off their assailants repeatedly, with frightful casualties on both sides. With the onrusr of infantry the big guns of the fort became useless, but t�le rebel machine guns and grenades took a heavy toll. vne group of cadets blundered onto a minefield, and many were drowned when the explosions shattered the ice. At length, the attackers penetrated the fort, and hand-to-hand combat continued throughout the day. It was not until 1 A.M. on the 18th that Fort Totleben finally surrendered, whereupon nearby Krasnoarmeets followed suit.

In the meantime, the Southern Group had launched its attack against the southern and eastern ends of the city. Leaving Oranienbaum at 4 A.M. on the 17th, about an hour after the departure of the Northern Group, a large force, pulling their machine guns and light artillery with them, advanced in three columns towards Kronstadt's military harbor, while a fourth column made for the Petrograd Gate, the city's most vulnerable point of entry. It was still dark when advance units of the 79th Infantry Brigade approached the heavy gun emplacements defending the harbor. Searchlights threw out shafts of light, but the darkness and fog concealed the camouflaged troops from the defenders. Reaching the southern end of the city, Communist shock detachments quickly overpowered the crews of several outer batteries . Then, as they pressed forward, they were met by a heavy barrage of machine-gun and artillery fire from the surrounding rebel strongpoints . Shells and grenades tore holes in the ice, while thousands of ricocheting bullets sent tiny puffs of

33 Grazhdanskaia voina, I, 370.

206

SUPPRESSION

snow into the air. Facing this hurricane of death out in the open, the approaching formations displayed remarkable courage, trying desperately to resume their advance. They were also urged on by exhortations and threats from the rear. Not surprisingly, however, some of the men panicked and refused to proceed any further. When two soldiers, seized with fear, took shelter in an ice-bound barge, their commander shot them on the spot, then led the others forward.34 The issue was decided, however, when several truckloads of rebel reinforcements arrived on the scene and, mounting a counterattack, drove the Communists to retreat. In the course of the battle more than half of the 79th Brigade were killed or wounded, including a number of delegates from the Tenth Party Congress .35

At the eastern end of the city the picture for the attackers was more encouraging. Just before daybreak, the 32nd Infantry Brigade, supported by the 95th and 96th Infantry Regiments, succeeded in breaching the wall north of the Petrograd Gate and fought their way into the town. About the same time, the 187th Infantry Brigade, commanded by Fedko and headed by a shock regiment of military cadets, forced an entry through the Gate itself, closely followed by the 167th and 80th Brigades . By this time the attackers had already suffered heavy losses, but once within the walls, in the words of a contemporary, "they encountered a veritable hell ."36 Machine guns and rifles seemed to fire at them from every window and every roof. On the sidewalks patches of red soon covered the ice and snow. The dead and wounded piled up on both sides, as the battle proceeded from street to street and house to house. Yet the rebels, even in the midst of this fratricidal bloodshed, when most of the forts

34 Alexander Barmine, One Who Survived, New York , 1 945, p. 9 5 . 35 Kornatovskii, ed., Krollshtadtskii miatezh, pp. 246-47. 36 "Khod sobytii v P etrograde vo vremia K ronshtadtskogo vossta

n iia," manuscript, March 1 9, 1 92 1 , Columbia Russian Archive.

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SUPPRESSION

had been taken and the battle was raging within the city itself, took no vengeance on their Communist prisoners. Near the Petrograd Gate a government rescue party hurried to the jail where their comrades were being kept and, breaking a window, handed in weapons to the inmates, who liberated themselves and immediately joined the fight. 37

Throughout the day the fighting continued without letup. According to some accounts, the women of Kronstadt threw themselves into the struggle, carrying ammunition to the defenders and removing the injured under heavy fire to first-aid stations in the city's hospitals. 38 At 4 P.M. the insurgents launched a sudden counterattack which sent the Bolsheviks reeling and threatened to drive them back onto the ice . But at this critical moment the 27th Cavalry Regiment and a detachment of party volunteers from Petrograd arrived to save the day. Just before sundown, artillery from Oranienbaum was brought into the city and opened fire on the rebels with devastating effect. As the battle raged, men on both sides fell from wounds and sheer exhaustion. During the evening the kursanty of the Northern Group penetrated the city from the northeast and seized the staff headquarters of the fortress, taking many prisoners. They then linked up with their comrades of the Southern Group, who by that time had fought their way from the Petrograd Gate to the center of the town. By midnight the fighting had begun to die down. One by one the last forts were taken. Victory was now clearly in sight.

On March 5, before any blood had been shed in Kronstadt, the Petrograd Defense Committee had warned the insurgents that at the last moment their ringleaders, "the Kozlovskys and Petrichenkos," would abandon them to their fate and flee

37 Komatovskii, ed. , Kronshtadtskii miatezh, pp. 7 8, 88. 38 Petrichenko, Pravda 0 Kronshtadtskikh sobytiiakh, p. 21 ; Voline,

La Revolution inconnue, p. 499 ; "Khod sobytii v Petrograde," C olumbia Russian Archive.

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SUPPRESSION

to Finland.39 This prediction was now fulfilled. On the evening of March 17, when all appeared lost, 1 1 members of the Revolutionary Committee ( including Petrichenko) escaped across the ice to Terijoki . ( Valk, Pavlov, and Perepelkin had been taken prisoner during the battle, and Vershinin, it will be recalled, had been seized on the ice during the first assault of March 8.) Kozlovsky, Solovianov, and other collaborating "military specialists" also fled. Shortly before midnight some 800 refugees, including the bulk of the rebel leadership, reached the Finnish coast. Having the most to fear from capture, they were the first to leave the island, except for a group from the numbered forts close to the Karelian shoreline. No doubt the prospect of summary execution had played a key part in their decision to evacuate. In any event, their departure was a signal for a mass exodus of defenders from Kotlin Island and its surrounding fortifications. During the next 24 hours a steady stream of refugees, mostly sailors, crossed the Finnish frontier. In all, some 8,000 fled, or more than half the total rebel strength. Some 400 horses were taken over the ice, and 2,500 discarded rifles were picked up near the coast by Finnish border guards.40

It has been noted that the Communist bombardment, while continuing on and off for 1 1 days, had done surprisingly little damage to Kronstadt's defenses. But now the retreating sailors, in a last gesture of defiance, removed the breech-locks from the guns of the forts and batteries, and destroyed dynamos, searchlights, machine guns, and other equipment. At the northern forts only a few of the weapons were in working order when the Communists returned.41 On the night of March 17 the commanders of the Petro

pavlovsk and Sevastopol instructed their crews to blow up the vessels, but the men, learning that their leaders had fled,

39 Komatovskii, ed., Kronshtadtskii miatezh, p. 1 89 . 4 () NOI'oia Rllsskaia Zlzi-;'Il', March 22 and 24, 1921.

41 London Times, M arch 30, 1921.

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SUPPRESSION

refused to carry out the order. Instead, they arrested the officers in charge and sent word to the Soviet command that they were ready to surrender. At 11 :50 P.M. Communist headquarters at Kronstadt was able to send a victory message to the Petrograd Defense Committee: "The counterrevolutionary nests on the Petropaviovsk and Sevastopo[ have been liquidated. Power rests in the hands of sympathizers with Soviet authority. Military activity aboard the Petropav[ovsk

and Sevastopol has ceased. Urgent measures are being taken to stop the officers who have fled towards the Finnish frontier. "42 During the early hours of March 18 detachments of kursanty occupied the two dreadnoughts. Meanwhile, except for a few pockets of diehards, the remaining insurgents were also surrendering, so that by noon on the 18th the forts and ships and nearly all of the town were in government hands. It only remained to mop up the isolated groups of defenders still holding out. During the afternoon the last resistance was overcome, and the guns of Kronstadt fell silent.

In its ferocity the battle of Kronstadt matched the bloodiest episodes of the Civil War. Losses were very heavy on both sides, but the Communists, forced to attack across the open ice against strongly entrenched defenders, paid much the greater cost. For the period from March 3 to 2 1 , according to official health reports, the hospitals of Petrograd contained more than 4,000 wounded and shock cases, while 527 more died in their beds. These figures, of course, do not include the large number who had perished in the fighting. After the battle so many bodies were strewn over the ice that the Finnish government asked Moscow to remove them for fear that when the thaw came they would be washed ashore and create a health hazard.43 A low estimate by official

42 Komatovskii, ed., Kronsh tadtskii miatezh, p. 243. 43 Mett, La Commune de Cronstadt, p. 5 6 ; London Times, March

3 1, 192 1 .

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SUPPRESSION

sources places total Communist dead at about 700, with 2,500 wounded or shell-shocked, but a Bolshevik participant noted that these figures were much too small, judging by what he alone had witnessed at Fort Number 6. Another estimate puts Red losses at 25,000 killed and wounded. However, according to Harold Quarton, the well-informed American consul in Viborg, total Soviet casualties amounted to about 10,000, which seems a reasonable calculation of all the dead, wounded, and missing taken together. 44 Some 1 5 delegates from the Tenth Party Congress lost their lives in the campaign. Together with the other fallen Bolsheviks, they were buried with military honors in a mass funeral held in Petrograd on March 24.45

Losses on the rebel side were fewer but by no means inconsiderable. No reliable figures are available, but one report puts the number of killed at 600, with more than 1 ,000

wounded and about 2,500 taken prisoner during the fighting.46 Among the dead, more than a few were massacred in the final stages of the struggle. Once inside the fortress, the attacking troops took revenge for their fallen comrades in

an orgy of bloodletting. A measure of the hatred which had built up during the assault was the regret expressed by one soldier that airplanes had not been used to machine gun the rebels fleeing across the ice to Finland. Trotsky and S. S. Kamenev, his commander in chief, sanctioned the use of chemical warfare against the insurgents, and if Kronstadt had resisted much longer, a plan to launch a gas attack with

44 Komatovs kii, ed., Kronshtadtskii miatezh, p. 1 07 ; Pukhov, Kronshtadtskii miatezh, p. 1 69 ; "Khod sobytii v Petrograde," Columbia Russian Archive; Quarton to Secretary of State, March 1 9, 1 92 1 , National Archives, 86 1 .00/ 8372. Lt. Kelley's figure of 25 to 30 thous and, however, is far too high : Quarton to Secretary of State, April 2 3 , 1 92 1 , 861 .00/86 1 9 .

45 Petrogradskaia Pravda, March 25, 1 92 1 . 46 Pukhov, Kronshtadtskii miatezh, p. 1 68 ; Grazhdanskaia voina,

I, 372 .

21 1

SUPPRESSION

shells and balloons, devised by cadets of the Higher Military Chemical School, would have been carried OUt.47

NEWS of the suppression spread rapidly, evoking a variety of responses in different quarters. In Western Europe the Russian expatriates were desolate. They bemoaned their failure to deliver �d to the rebels and denounced Great Britain for signing its trade agreement with the Bolsheviks in the very midst of the struggle. One emigre journal, however, refused to despair. In an editorial on "The Lessons of Kronstadt," it declared that the fight for Russia's liberation would continue until victory had been achieved. Similarly, Professor Grimm wrote to a colleague that if a new outbreak should occur in Petrograd their group must not again be caught unawares.48

Inside Russia the Bolsheviks exulted in their hard-won triumph. But mingled with their exultation was a note of regret for their "erring sailor comrades." Sharing these feelings were the Communist visitors from abroad, who continued to support the regime, however uncertain they might be about the course it was taking; for Bolshevik Russia, they reasoned, with all its shortcomings, was the first socialist state in history, the first country in which the landlords and bourgeoisie had been driven from their entrenched power. Next to this, in their eyes, other considerations were of secondary importance. But some foreign Communists, like Victor Serge, were deeply troubled by what had happened. And for anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman the suppression of Kronstadt had a shattering effect. On the night of March 17, recalled Goldman in her memoirs, when the thunder of cannon came to a stop, the stillness that

47 V. Pozdnyakov, "The Chemical Arm," in The R ed A rmy, ed., B. H. L iddell Hart, New York, 1 956, pp. 3 84-85. Colonel Pozdnyakov had been one of the students who drew up the plan.

48 Za Narodlloe Delo, March 19, 1 92 1 ; Grimm to Giers, March 3 1 , 1 92 1 , Giers Archives, File 88.

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fell over Petrograd was more fearful than the incessant firing

of the preceding days. During the final hours, Berkman,

"the last thread of his faith in the Bolsheviki broken," wan

dered helplessly through the streets, while Goldman sat

in unbelieving agony in their hotel, "unutterable weariness

in every nerve." As she sat, peering into the darkness, Petro

grad seemed "a ghastly corpse" hung in a black pall, the

street-lamps flickering yellow "like candles at its head and

feet." The next morning, March 18, the Petrograd news

papers carried banner headlines commemorating the fiftieth

anniversary of the Paris Commune. Bands played military

tunes and Communists paraded in the streets, singing the

"Internationale." "Its strains," noted Goldman, "once jubi

lant to my ears, now sounded like a funeral dirge for hu

manity's flaming hope." Berkman made a bitter entry in his

diary : "The victors are celebrating the anniversary of the

Commune of 187 l . Trotsky and Zinoviev denounce Thiers

and Gallifet for the slaughter of the Paris rebels."49

In Kronstadt, meanwhile, the Bolsheviks made every

effort to eliminate the traces of the rising. Pavel Dybenko was

appointed commander of the fortress, endowed with absolute

powers to purge the city of dissident elements and disloyal

ideas. In place of the Kronstadt Soviet, which was not re

vived, a revtroika consisting of Vasiliev, Bregman, and

Gribov, three of Kronstadt's most trusted Bolshevik leaders,

was established to assist the new commander. On March 1 8

a new journal, Red Kronstadt, began to appear in the city.

The battleships Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol were re

christened the Marat and Paris Commune, while Anchor

Square became the Square of the Revolution. Party reregis

tration was at once carried out, during which some 350

members were excluded or failed to appear. And a "surgical

49 Goldman, Living My Life, p. 886; Berkman, The Bolshevik Myth, p. 303. Thiers was premier of France and Gallifet the general who subdued the Communards.

21 3

SUPPRESSION

operation," as one writer put it, was performed on the

Soviet Navy : unreliable Baltic sailors were scattered to the

Black Sea, the Caspian, and the Aral, and to the Amur

River flotilla in the Far East, while all naval units were

purged of alleged Ivanmory-some 1 5,000 in all-within

their ranks. 50 The Red Army soldiers who participated in

the final assault were also dispersed to remote locations

around the country. Only a month later their leader, Tu

khachevsky, took command of the punitive expedition sent

to crush Antonov's guerrillas in the Tambov region. 51

Finally, it remains to describe the fate of the Kronstadt

survivors. None of the captured rebels received a public

hearing. From more than 2,000 prisoners taken during the

struggle, 1 3 were chosen to be tried in camera as ringleaders

of the mutiny. To bolster the case for a counterrevolutionary

conspiracy, the Soviet press took pains to emphasize their

social backgrounds : 5 were ex-naval officers of noble birth,

1 a former priest, and 7 of peasant origin. 52 Their names

are unfamiliar : none belonged to the Revolutionary Com

mittee, four of whose members-Valk, Pavlov, Perepelkin,

and Vershinin-are known to have been in government

custody, nor were any from among the "military specialists"

who played an advisory role in the uprising. All the same,

50 Komatovskii, ed., Kronshtadtskii miatezh, p. 1 5 ; Pukhov, Kronshtadtskii miatezh, pp. 1 76-80. Cf. G. A. Cheremshanskii, "Kronshtadtskoe vosstanie, 28 fevralia- 1 8 marta 192 1 ," manuscript, Columbia Russian Archive. Cheremshansky was among the Baltic sailors transferred to the Amur.

51 Fedko also took a leading part in suppressing Antonov. See M. N. Tukhachevskii, "Bor'ba s kontrrevoliutsionnymi vosstaniiami," Voina i Revoliutsiia, 1926, No. 8, pp. 3 - 1 5 ; A. I. Todorskii, Marshal Tukhachevskii, Moscow, 1963, pp. 7 1-73 ; and Nikulin, Tukhachevskii,

pp. 1 5 1 -56. 52 Krasnaia Gazeta, March 23, 192 1 ; Petrogradskaia Pravda,

March 23, 192 1 ; Komatovskii, ed . , Kronshtadtskii miatezh, pp. 247-49. According to the charges, the accused were responsible for the death or injury of "several thousand" Red troops, which tends to bear out Quarton's estimate of Bolshevik losses.

214

SUPPRESSION

the 1 3 "ringleaders" were tried on March 20 and condemned

to execution.

Of the remaining prisoners, several hundred are said to

have been shot at once in Kronstadt. The rest were removed

by the Cheka to its prisons on the mainland. In Petrograd

the jails were filled to overflowing, and over a period of

several months hundreds of rebels were taken out in small

batches and shot. These included Perepelkin, whom Fyodor

Dan had met while exercising in his prison courtyard. Before

his execution he drafted a detailed account of the rising,

but what became of it Dan did not knoW. 53 Others were sent

to concentration camps, such as the notorious Solovki prison

in the White Sea, condemned to forced labor, which for

many meant a slow death from hunger, exhaustion, and

illness.54 In some cases, the families of the insurgents suffered

a similar fate. Kozlovsky's wife and two sons, who had been

taken as hostages in early March, were sent to a concentra

tion camp; only his l l -year-old daughter was spared.55

What became of the rebels who fled to Finland? Some

8,000 escaped across the ice and were interned in refugee

camps at Terijoki, Viborg, and Ino. Nearly all the fugitives

were sailors and soldiers, with only a sprinkling of male

civilians, women, and children. 56 The American and British

53 Dan, Dva goda skitanii, pp. 1 53-57. 54 Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work, p. 1 6 8 ; David DaIlin and

Boris Nicolaevsky, Forced Labor in Soviet R ussia, New Haven, 1 947, p. 1 70. According to a recent Soviet work, however, the majority of captured sailors were subsequently pardoned, " severe punishment" (i.e., execution ) being meted out only to the ringleaders and implacable enemies of Soviet authority : Sofinov, lstoricheskii povorot,

p. 36n. 55 Dan, Dva goda skitanii, p. 1 58. Another contemporary source,

probably in error, says that both sons were shot : "Svedeniia iz Petrograda ot 12 aprelia: Kronshtadt i otgoloski ego vosstaniia," manuscript, Hoover Library.

56 The largest camp, at Fort Ino, contained 3 ,597 internees, of whom there were 3 ,584 men, 10 women, and 3 children. Only 25 of the men were nonmilitary : Novaia Russkaia Zhizn', March 27, 1 92 1 .

215

SUPPRESSION

Red Cross supplied them with food and clothing. Some were

given employment in road construction and other public

works. But life in the camps was bleak and depressing, and

the refugees, who at first were allowed no contact with the

local population, found it very difficult to adjust. The Finnish

government appealed to the League of Nations to help settle

them in other countries, while the Bolsheviks demanded their

repatriation with their weapons. Lured by a promise of

amnesty, many returned to Russia, only to be arrested and

shipped off to concentration camps. In May and June groups

of them passed through Dan's prison en route to a future

of forced labor and early death. 57

Despite the prevailing gloom and bitterness, Petrichenko

continued to enjoy the respect of his fellow fugitives. His

biggest mistake, they said, was his failure to shoot the

Communist leaders in Kronstadt. Petrichenko himself had no

regrets on this score. But he did admit, when interviewed at

Terijoki by an American reporter, that the rebellion had

been premature and poorly organized. "We are defeated,"

he said, "but the movement will proceed because it comes

from the people themselves . . . . There are [millions] like me

in Russia, not reactionary Whites and murderous Reds, and

from these plain people will come the overthrow of the Bol

sheviki."58 Little is known of Petrichenko's subsequent life

in exile. A Soviet collection of documents and memoirs per

taining to the Kronstadt rising contains what purports to be

a letter from the rebel leader to a friend in Russia, dated

November 1 7, 1 923, in which he acknowledges his mistakes

57 London Times, March 30, 1 92 1 ; D an, Dva goda skitanii, p. 1 59. Later in the year, according to some reports, a band of Kronstadt refugees organized the "Plekhanov Battalion" and, together with Finnish partisans, fought against the Bolsheviks in Eastern Karelia. See C. Jay Smith, Finland and the Russian Revolution, 1917-1922,

Athens, Ga., 1 9 58, pp. 1 93 -97. 58 Quarton to Secretary of State, April 5, 1 92 1 , National Archives,

861 .00/8446 ; New York Times, March 3 1 , 192 1 .

216

SUPPRESSION

and indicates that he has applied for readmission to his homeland.5 9 The letter, however, is of doubtful authenticity. An article published by Petrichenko in an SR journal in December 1925 shows not the slightest repentance for his role in the rebellion, which he continues to uphold as a spontaneous outbreak against the dictatorship of the Communist party, or rather of its leaders.60

The official Soviet history of the Civil War mistakenly records that Petrichenko soon left Finland and resettled in Czechoslovakia. In fact, he remained in Finland for nearly a quarter-century. In the aftermath of defeat, as we have seen, he was ready to cooperate with emigre circles in Western Europe, with whom he shared a desire to liberate Russia from Bolshevik rule. Later, however, he joined pro-Soviet groups in Finland. During the Second World War these activities got him into trouble with the Finnish authorities, and in 1945 he was repatriated to Russia, where he was immediately arrested. He died in a prison camp a year or two later. 61

59 Kornatovskii, ed . , Kronshtadtskii miatezh, pp. 1 63-64. 60 Petrichenko, "0 prichinakh Kronshtadtskogo vosstaniia," Znamia

Bor'by, December 1 925-January 1 926, pp. 4-8. 61 Grazhdanskaia l'oina, I , 362; Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary,

p. 1 3 2 n ; Unto Parvilahti, Beria's Garde ns , New York. 1 960, pr. 2 1 , 285.

2 1 7

7. Epilogue

K ronstadt fell. The insurgents had fought with determination and courage. But their prospects for success had been dim from the start. The rising, as its leaders themselves acknowledged, had been badly timed and ill-prepared. The sailors had no invasion force, nor any outside help, while the Bolsheviks, having won the Civil War, were free to concentrate the best of their armed might against them. Moreover, the ice on the Finnish Gulf was still frozen solid, enabling the government to mount a large-scale infantry attack against the isolated rebel stronghold. Compared with the anti-Soviet movements of the Civil War, then, Kronstadt was an affair of modest proportions. If the Bolsheviks had been able to defeat Denikin, Ko1chak, and Yudenich, and to turn back the legions of Pilsudski, then Kronstadt could not in itself have posed a serious military threat.

What really alarmed the Bolsheviks was the possibility that it might touch off a general revolt on the mainland or become the spearhead of a new intervention. The country, they knew, was in a state of turmoil verging on mass rebellion. So far, they had been able to keep their opponents isolated ; but Kronstadt, though involving fewer numbers than, say, the peasant revolts in Siberia and Tambov, was well-fortified and manned by trained military personnel, and, situated as it was in the Baltic rather than the remote interior, could serve as a stepping-stone for an invading army.

Nevertheless, a rebel victory is hard to imagine. The Russian people, however embittered, were war-weary and demoralized, and with all their grievances against the government, they still feared a White restoration more than they hated the Communists. Moreover, the strikes in Petrograd, on which the sailors pinned their hopes, had already passed their climax. As for outside support, the Western powers had

218

EPILOGUE

abandoned their policy of intervention and were shifting towards an accommodation with the Bolsheviks. The rebellion failed to upset the Anglo-Soviet trade agreement, as the Whites had hoped and the Communists feared ; the pact was signed in London on March 1 6, only hours before the final assault on Kronstadt. On the same day, moreover, a friendship treaty with Turkey was concluded in Moscow. Nor did Kronstadt hinder negotiations with the Poles, who had no desire to renew the struggle with their old-time adversary. The treaty of Riga was signed on March 1 8 , while Communist troops were mopping up the last pockets of rebel resistance. Finland, too, turned its back on the insurgents and prevented any aid from passing across its borders. Finally, the Russian emigres remained as divided and ineffectual as before, with no prospect of cooperation in sight. General Wrangel, his troops dispersed and their morale sagging, was in no position to help; months would have been needed merely to mobilize his men and transport them from the Mediterranean to the Baltic. Or if a second front were attempted in the south, it would have meant almost certain disaster.

For the rebels the only hope of success lay in an immediate offensive on the mainland. Had they followed the advice of the "military specialists" and seized a b�idgehead at Or ani enbaum, there was a good chance that units of Red Army, and perhaps civilians as well, would have rallied to their standard. A rebellion against the state, as Alexander Berkman observed, must assume the initiative and strike with determination, allowing the government no time to muster its forces. Once it isolates itself or plays a waiting game, it is doomed to certain defeat. In this respect, noted Berkman, Kronstadt repeated the fatal error of the Paris Commune : just as the latter rejected an immediate attack on Versailles while the government of Thiers was disorganized, Kronstadt

219

EPILOGUE

failed to march on Petrograd before the authorities could

ready their defenses. 1 In March 1 908, Lenin, in an article

commemorating the Commune, had made a similar observa

tion when he decried "the excessive magnanimity of the

proletariat : instead of annihilating its enemies, it endeavored

to exercise moral influence on them ; it neglected the im

portance of purely military activity in the civil war, and in

stead of crowning its victory in Paris by a determined advance

on Versailles, it delayed long enough for the Versailles gov

ernment to gather its dark forces in preparation for the

bloody week of May."2 A fitting epitaph for the Kronstadt

commune of 1 92 1 .

THUS it is difficult to escape the conclusion that, short of an

invasion of the mainland, it was only a matter of time before

the rebels would be crushed. In all likelihood this was true

even if they had held out until the ice had melted and aid

had reached them from the west. Protected by open water

and replenished with food, medicine, and ammunition, they

might have survived a few weeks longer and taken a heavier

toll of Bolshevik lives, but sooner or later they were bound to

succumb, if not to military pressure alone, then to the same

combination of force and economic concessions which sealed

the fate of the Petrograd strike movement and of the rural

insurrections throughout the country. Everywhere the New

Economic Policy was blunting the edge of discontent, and

Kronstadt would have been no exception.

This is not to suggest that Kronstadt was in any way

responsible for the NEP, apart, perhaps, from hastening its

implementation. By March 1 92 1 Lenin needed no further

convincing to abandon the program of War Communism. He

1 Berkman, The Kronstadt R ebellion, pp. 39-40. The same observation was made by a Menshevik writer in Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik, April 5, 1 92 1 , p. 5. As Marx once wrote : "The defensive is the death of every armed rising."

2 Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, XVI, 452-53.

220

EPILOGUE

and his associates had been reassessing their economic policies since the end of the Civil War, and had formulated the basic outlines of the NEP some weeks before the rebellion erupted. As early as December 1 920, when SR and Menshevik delegates to the Eighth Congress of Soviets called for a halt to food requisitions and for the introduction of a tax in kind, Lenin had already been considering such a move. Several weeks passed, however, before any action was taken. At length, the swelling tide of unrest persuaded him that the survival of Bolshevik rule was at stake, and, at a meeting of the Politburo on February 8, during which the whole question of agrarian policy was carefully reviewed, he outlined a plan to replace forced requisitions by a tax in kind, with the right of the peasant to dispose of his surplus after meeting his obligations to the state. During the succeeding weeks the project was discussed in the Soviet press. On February 24, five days before the outbreak at Kronstadt, a detailed draft based on Lenin's notes was presented to the Central Committee for inclusion on the agenda of the impending Tenth Party Congress .3

But the meaning of the rebellion was not lost on the congress when it assembled in Moscow on March 8. By highlighting the intensity of popular opposition, the revolt imparted a sense of urgency to the proceedings and dispelled any doubts about the need for immediate reform. The party saw the writing on the wall . There were those, indeed, who speculated that the rising might never have happened if the NEP had been introduced but a month before.4 Be that as it may, there was general agreement that the reforms brooked no further delay lest the Bolsheviks be swept from power by a tidal wave of popular anger. Kronstadt, as Lenin put it, "lit up reality better than anything else." Lenin saw that the mutiny was no isolated incident but part of a broad pattern of unrest em-

3 Ibid. , XLII, 3 3 3 . Cf. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, II, 280-82. 4 Slepkov, Kronslztadtskii miatezh, p. 15 .

22 1

EPILOGUE

bracing the risings in the countryside, the disturbances in the factories, and the growing ferment within the armed forces. The economic crisis of War Communism, he noted, had been transformed into "a political one : Kronstadt," and the future of Bolshevism hung in the balance. 5

The Tenth Party Congress, one of the most dramatic in Bolshevik history, marked a fundamental change in Soviet policy. Years before, Lenin had laid down two conditions for the victory of socialism in Russia : the support of a proletarian revolution in the West and an alliance between the Russian workers and pe�sants. 6 By 1 92 1 neither of these conditions had been fulfilled. As a result, Lenin was forced to abandon his belief that without the support of a European revolution the transition to socialism was impossible. Here, in essence, lay the seeds of "socialism in one country," a doctrine evolved by Stalin a few years later and entailing a slowing down of the revolutionary process, an accommodation with the capitalist powers abroad and with the peasantry at home. The immediate and overriding need, on which everything else depended, was to placate the rebellious rural population. As Lenin explained to the Tenth Congress, "only an agreement with the peasantry can save the socialist revolution in Russia until the revolution has occurred in other countries."7 Three years earlier, in March 1 9 1 8, Lenin had made a similar retreat on the international front when he rejected a "revolutionary war" against Germany and signed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Now, in order to secure the "breathing spell" which the Bolsheviks had been denied in 1 9 1 8, Lenin scrapped War Communism for a more cautious and conciliatory domestic program. "We must satisfy the economic desires of the middle peasantry and introduce free trade," he declared, "or else the preservation of the power of the

5 Lenin, Polnoe jobranie sochinenii, XLIn, 1 3 8, 3 87 . 6 See Carr, The Bolshevik R evolution, II, 277-79. 'f Desiaryi fezd RKP(b ) , p. 404.

222

EPILOGUE

proletariat in Russia, given the delay in the worldwide revolution, will be impossible."8

Thus, on March 15, the Tenth Party Congress adopted what one delegate ( the Marxist scholar D. B. Riazanov) called a "peasant Brest."9 The measure, which formed the cornerstone of the New Economic Policy, replaced compulsory food collections with a tax in kind and conceded the right of the peasant to dispose of his surpluses in the free

,

market. This was but the first of a series of steps in the transi-tion from War Communism to a mixed economy. Valerian Osinsky's proposal for a centrally directed sowing campaign, put forward at the Eighth Congress of Soviets, was abandoned. Armed roadblocks were everywhere withdrawn from the highways and railroads, and trade between city and village was revived. Moreover, Trotsky's labor armies were disbanded and the trade unions granted a measure of autonomy, including the right to elect their own officials and to subject to free debate all issues affecting the interests of the workers. Subsequent decrees restored private retail shops and consumer production, while the state retained the "commanding heights" of the economy-heavy industry, foreign trade, transportation, and communications-in its own hands. Each of these steps drove another nail into the coffin of mass opposition, while stirring new life in the Russian town and village. For several months peasant unrest continued to smolder in Tambov, Siberia, and the Volga basin, but heavy formations of kursanty and Cheka troops-the same sort of units used against Kronstadt-were called to the scene, and by the autumn of 1921 effective resistance had been stamped out.

For Lenin the NEP was not intended as a mere stop-gap measure until order had been restored and Bolshevik author-

8 Ibid., p. 4 1 3 . 9 Ibid., p. 468. For the decision abolishing forced requisitions, see

ibid., pp. 608-609.

223

EPILOGUE

ity consolidated on a more secure footing. "Until we have remolded the peasant," he told the Tenth Congress, "until large-scale machinery has recast him, we must assure him of the possibility of running his economy without restrictions. We must find forms of coexistence with the small farmer." Lenin acknowledged that collectivization had been pushed too far and had alienated the individual peasant proprietor. We shall have to deal with him for many years to come, he said, "since the remaking of the small farmer, the reshaping of his whole psychology and all his habits, is a task requiring generations ."10 By this admission, Lenin tacitly conceded an argument of his Menshevik critics, who in 1 9 1 7 had warned against any premature attempt to plunge their backward agrarian country into socialism. True Marxists, they had insisted, knew that the moment was not yet ripe, that Russia, with its small proletariat and overwhelming peasant population, lacked the essential conditions for a socialist revolution. Engels too had written that nothing was worse than a premature revolution, that is, one in which a socialist party would come to power before industrialism and democracy had had a proper chance to develop. The Bolsheviks, however, proceeded to attempt what the doctrine of historical materialism declared to be impossible : to make a socialist revolution before the necessary preliminaries had been achieved. The New Economic Policy was an effort to make up these deficiencies. As Lenin envisioned it, the NEP was to be a long period of economic recovery, a period of reconciliation between town and country, during which the groundwork for a socialist society was to be laid.

THE NEP succeeded in relieving a good deal of the tensions in Russian society. Yet it failed to satisfy the demands of Kronstadt and its sympathizers. To be sure, the confiscation

10 Ibid., pp. 3 7-38, 406. Cf. Schapiro, The Origin of the Commu

nist A utocracy, p. 3 1 1 .

224

EPILOGUE

of grain had been ended and the roadblocks removed, the

labor battalions dissolved and the trade unions assured a

degree of independence from the state. But the state farms

remained intact, and capitalism had been partially restored

in the industrial sector. Contrary to the principles of prole

tarian democracy, moreover, the old directors and technical

specialists continued to run the large factories; the workers

remained the victims of "wage slavery," excluded as before

from a role in management.

Nor, of course, was there any revival of democracy in

military life. The right to elect ship committees and political

commissars remained a dead issue. After Kronstadt there was

no longer any question of decentralizing authority or of re

laxing military discipline within the fleet. On the contrary,

Lenin proposed to Trotsky that the Baltic Fleet be scrapped

since the sailors were unreliable and the ships of questionable

military value. But Trotsky managed to persuade his col

league that such a drastic step was unnecessary. Instead, the

Soviet Navy was purged of all dissident elements and com

pletely reorganized, with Young Communists filling the

naval cadet schools to insure trustworthy leadership in the

years ahead. At the same time, discipline was tightened with

in the Red Army, while plans for a popular militia, to be

drawn from peasant and worker volunteers, were forever

abandoned. 11

More important still, not a single political demand of the

rebels was fulfilled. What took place, rather, was a harden

ing of dictatorial rule. The concessions of the NEP, indeed,

were made expressly to consolidate the Bolshevik monopoly

of power. In his outline for a speech to the Tenth Congress,

Lenin noted: "The lesson of Kronstadt: in politics-the

closing of the ranks (and discipline) within the party, greater

struggle against the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolution-

11 Pukhov, Kronshtadtskii miatezh, pp. 185-205; White, The Growth of the Red Army, pp. 191-93,246-49.

225

EPILOGUE

aries; in economics-to satisfy as far as possible the middle

peasantry."12 Accordingly, popular initiative remained par

alyzed, free soviets a frustrated dream. The state refused

to restore freedom of speech, press, and assembly, as called

for in the Petropavlovsk charter, or to release the socialists

and anarchists accused of political crimes. Far from being

drawn into a coalition government of revitalized soviets, the

left-wing parties were methodically suppressed. On the night

of March 17, by a melancholy coincidence, as the Kron

stadt Revolutionary Committee was fleeing across the ice to

Finland, the deposed Menshevik government of Georgia, the

last of its kind in Soviet Russia, left the Black Sea port of

Batum for West European exile.13 During the Civil War,

the Bolsheviks, menaced by Whites on every side, had al

lowed the pro-Soviet parties of the Left a precarious existence

under continuous harassment and surveillance. After Kron

stadt even this was no longer tolerated. All pretense of a legal

opposition was abandoned in May 1921, when Lenin declared

that the place for rival socialists was behind bars or in exile,

side by side with the White Guards.14 A new wave of repres

sions descended on the Mensheviks, SR's, and anarchists,

whom the authorities had charged with complicity in the

revolt. The more fortunate were permitted to emigrate, but

thousands were swept up in the Cheka dragnet and banished

to the far north, Siberia, and Central Asia. By the end of the

year the active remnants of political opposition had been

silenced or driven underground, and the consolidation of

one-party rule was all but complete. Thus Kronstadt, like all

unsuccessful revolts against authoritarian regimes. achieved

the opposite of its intended goal: instead of a new era of

12 Desiatyi s"ezd RKP(b), p. 625. 13 Boldin, "Men'sheviki v Kronshtadtskom miatezhe," Krasnaia

Letopis', 1931, No. 3, p. 28; Katkov, "The Kronstadt Rising, St.

AntollY's Papers, No.6, p. 13.

14 Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, XLIII, 241.

226

EPILOGUE

popular self-government, the Communist dictatorship was

fastened upon the country more firmly than ever.

The tightening of Bolshevik rule was accompanied by a

drive to end the divisions within the party itself. Far from

granting "party democracy," Lenin announced that factional

quarrels must cease at once if the regime was to survive the

present crisis. "The time has come," he told the Tenth Con

gress, "to put an end to opposition, to put the lid on it; we

have had enough opposition."15 Lenin used Kronstadt as a

cudgel to beat the oppositionists into submission, hinting that

their criticisms of party policies had encouraged the rebels to

take up arms against the government. 16 His views found

strong support among his listeners, who shared his fears

that a mass revolt might sweep them from power. "At the

present time," one speaker declared, "there are three factions

in the party, and this congress must say whether we shall

tolerate such a condition in the party any longer. In my

opinion, we cannot go against General Kozlovsky with three

factions, and the party congress must say SO."17 The delegates

readily complied. In a sharply worded resolution they voted

to condemn the program of the Workers' Opposition as a

"syndicalist and anarchist deviation" from the Marxist tradi

tion. A second resolution, "On Party Unity," cited Kronstadt

as an example of how internal disputes might be exploited

by the forces of counterrevolution, and it called for the dis

solution of all factions and groupings within the party.

Its final clause, kept secret for nearly three years, gave the

Central Committee extraordinary powers to expel dissident

members from the party's ranks.ls Soon after, Lenin ordered

a purge of the party "from top to bottom" to eliminate un

reliable elements. By the end of the summer nearly a quarter

of the total membership had been excluded.

15 Desiatyi s"ezd RTCP(b), p. 118; Schapiro, The Origin of the

Communist Autocracy, p. 316. 16 Desiatyi s"ezd RKP(b), pp. 34-35.

17 Ibid., p. 276. IS/bid., pp. 571-76.

227

EPILOGUE

FOR a sensitive libertarian like Alexander Berkman, Kron

stadt was a sobering experience, leading him to . a critical

reexamination of Bolshevik theory and practice. Yet the

rising, for all its tragic drama, did not impress many others

at the time as being a decisive event. It played no major role

in determining the policies of Lenin's regime; the shift towards

a relaxation in foreign and domestic affairs had been under

way since the end of the Civil War. Its importance, rather,

was primarily as symbol of a broader social crisis-the transi

tion from War Communism to the NEP-which Lenin, in a

speech to the Fourth Comintern Congress, called the gravest

in Soviet history.19 But when the passage of time brought a

new era of Stalinist totalitarianism, the revolt acquired new

significance. "In point of truth," wrote Emma Goldman in

1938, at the height of the Great Purge, "the voices strangled

in Kronstadt have grown in volume these seventeen years."

"What a pity," she added, that "the silence of the dead

sometimes speaks louder than the living voice. "20 From the

perspective of the Moscow trials and the Stalinist reign of terror, many saw the rebellion as a fatal crossroads in the

history of the Russian Revolution, marking the triumph of

bureaucratic repression and the final defeat of the decen

tralized and libertarian form of socialism.

This is not to say that Soviet totalitarianism began with

the suppression of Kronstadt, or even that it was already

inevitable at that time. "It is often said," remarked Victor

Serge, "that 'the germ of Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its beginning.' Well, I have no objection. Only, Bolsheviks also

contained many other germs-a mass of other germs-and those who lived through the enthusiasm of the first years of

the first victorious revolution ought not to forget it. To judge

the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals

in a corpse-and which he may have carried with him since

19 Degras, ed., The Communist International, I, 2 1 3. 20 Goldman, Trotsky Protests Too Much, p. 7.

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EPILOGUE

his birth-is this very sensible?"21 During the early twenties,

in other words, a number of different paths remained open

to Soviet society. Yet, as Serge himself emphasized, a pro

nounced authoritarian streak had always been present in

Bolshevik theory and practice. Lenin's ingrained. elitism, his

insistence on centralized leadersl)ip and tight party discipline,

his suppression of civil liberties and sanction of terror-all

this left a deep imprint on the future development of the

Communist party and Soviet state. During the Civil War

Lenin had sought to justify these policies as short-term ex

pedients required by an emergency situation. But the emer

gency was never to end, and meanwhile the apparatus for a

future totalitarian regime was being built. With the defeat

of Kronstadt and the smothering of the left-wing opposition,

the last effective demand for a toilers' democracy passed into

history. Thereafter totalitarianism, if not inevitable, was a likely eventuality.

In 1924 Lenin died, and the Bolshevik leadership was

plunged into a fierce struggle for power. Three years later

a climax was reached when the Central Committee, invoking the secret clause of the Tenth Congress resolution on

party unity, expelled Trotsky from the party and soon after

drove him into exile. Ironically, when Trotsky formed his

own opposition against Stalin's tyranny and bureaucratism, the ghost of Kronstadt was raised against him by libertarian

socialists who recalled his role in the crushing of the rebel

lion. In reply to his critics, Trotsky tried to show that he

had not been directly involved. "The fact of the matter," he

wrote in 1938, "is that I personally took not the slightest part

either in the pacification of the Kronstadt rising or in the·

repressions which followed."22 Throughout the affair, he in-

21 Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, pp. xv-xvi. 22 L. Trotskii, "Eshche ob usmirenii Kronshtadta," Biulleten' Op

pozitsii, October 1938, p. 10; The New International, August 1938,

pp. 249-50.

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EPILOGUE

sisted, he remained in Moscow; Zinoviev handled matters in

Petrograd, and the repressions were the work of the Cheka,

headed by Dzerzhinsky, who would brook no interference

from any quarter.

In any event, he said, the rebellion had to be crushed.

Idealists have always charged the revolution with "excesses,"

but these in fact "flow from the very nature of revolutions,

which are themselves 'excesses' of history." Kronstadt was

nothing but "an armed reaction of the petty bourgeoisie

against the hardships of social revolution and the severity

of the proletarian dictatorship." If the Bolsheviks had not

acted swiftly, the revolt might have toppled them and opened

the floodgates of counterrevolution. Were his critics denying

the government the right to defend itself or to discipline its

own armed forces? Could any government tolerate a military

mutiny in its midst? Should we have cast our power to the

winds without a struggle? What the Bolsheviks did at Kron

stadt, Trotsky concluded, was "a tragic necessity."23

But his critics were not convinced. For all his assertions

to the contrary, Trotsky, as War Commissar and chairman of

the Revolutionary War Council, did exercise general respon

sibility for the suppression of Kronstadt. He did indeed go to

Petrograd, where he issued the ultimatum of March 5; he

also visited Oranienbaum and Krasnaya Gorka, and played

no small part in overseeing Communist military preparations,

if not so crucial a role as that of Zinoviev and Tukhachevsky.

Moreover, as Dwight Macdonald pointed out, Trotsky never

answered the charge that the Bolsheviks handled the revolt

with unnecessary intransigence and brutality. How seriously

did they attempt to reach a peaceful settlement? If it was

true that the Whites would have profited from divisions with-

23 Trotsky, "Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt," The New International,

April 1938, pp. 103-105; Trotsky, Stalin, New York, 1946, p. 337.

Trotsky's remark that excesses "flow from the very nature of revolu

tions" recalls Engels' dictum tliat a revolution is "the most authori

tarian thing imaginable."

230

EPILOGUE

in the party, were not the dangers of an air-tight dictatorship,

insulated against mass pressure, even greater? Would a

Stalinist clique have been able so easily to usurp control of

a party which had allowed greater participation to the masses

and greater freedom to the left-wing opposition?24 In a

similar vein, Anton Ciliga challenged the Bolshevik claim that

Kronstadt, had it not been subdued, would have let loose the

forces of reaction. This is possible, conceded Ciliga, but

what is certain is that the revolution perished in 1921.25

In the end, the victors at Kronstadt fell victim to the sys

tem they had helped to create. Trotsky and Zinoviev were

damned as "enemies of the people" who had wittingly

abetted the counterrevolution. "Judas Trotsky," declared a

Soviet pamphlet of 1939, had packed Kronstadt with his

own henchmen, including bandits and White Guards, while

deliberately creating a smokescreen with the trade union is

sue. Another Stalinist work blamed the revolt on Trotsky's

"protege, the commander of the Seventh Army Tukhachev

sky," and on "the old Trotskyite Raskolnikov," the head

of the Baltic Fleet. To deal with the traitors, it said, the

party sent the "true Leninist" and comrade-in-arms of Stalin,

Kliment Voroshilov (who actually played a minor role as a

commissar at the Kronstadt front) .26 Qne by one the revolution

devoured its makers. Zinoviev, Tukhachevsky, and Dybenko

were shot in the Great Purge; Trotsky was murdered in

Mexico by an agent of the Soviet secret police; Raskolnikov

and Lashevich committed suicide. Many of the party dele

gates who went to Kronstadt, including Piatakov, Zatonsky,

24 The New International, July 1938, pp. 212-13.

25 Anton Ciliga, The Kronstadt Revolt, London, 1 942, p. 13.

26 Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1st edn., xxxv, 222; 2nd edn., XXIII, 484; O. Leonidov, Lihidatsiia Kronshtadtskogo miatezha

(mart 1921 g.), Moscow, 1939, pp. 8-9, 139; K. Zhakovshchikov, Razgrom Kronshtadtskogo kontrrel'oliutsion!logo miatezha v 1921

godu, Leningrad, 1941, p. 62. Cf. Abramovitch, The Soviet Revolu

tion, p. 209.

231

EPILOGUE

and Bubnov, disappeared in Stalin's prisons. Kalinin almost

alone died a natural death in 1946. But the martyrs of Kron

stadt survived, enshrined in the memory of the people as the

revolution's guiltless children.27

27 Cf. Mett, La Commune de Cronstadt, p. 6; and I. N. Steinberg,

In thl? Workshop of the Revolution, New York, 1953, p. 300.

232

APPENDIXES

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Appendix A

Memorandum on the Question 0/ Organizing

an Uprising in Kronstadt*

Top Secret 1 92 1

Information emanating from Kronstadt compels one to believe that during the coming spring an uprising will erupt in Kronstadt. If its preparation receives some outside support, one may count entirely on the success of the rising, towards which the following circumstances will be favorable.

At the present time, concentrated in Kronstadt harbor are all the vessels of the Baltic Fleet, which still maintain their military importance. In this connection, the predominant force in Kronstadt rests with the sailors of the active fleet, as well as the sailors on shore duty in the Kronstadt Fortress. All power is concentrated in the hands of a small group of Communist sailors ( the local Soviet, the Cheka, the Revolutionary Tribunal, the commissars and party collectives of the ships, and so on) . The rest of the garrison and the workers of Kronstadt do not play a significant role. Meanwhile, one can observe among the sailors numerous and unmistakable signs of mass discontent with the existing order. The sailors unanimously will join the ranks of the insurgents, once a small group of individuals by quick and decisive action seizes power in Kronstadt. Among the sailors such a group has already been formed, ready and able to take the most energetic actions.

The Soviet government is well informed about the hostile attitude of the sailors. In this connection, the Soviet government has seen to it that not more than a week's supply of food is available in Kronstadt at any one time, whereas in

* "Dokladnaia zapiska po voprosu ob organizatsii vosstaniia v Kronshtadte," manuscript, Columbia Russian Archive. (Translated by the author. )

235

APPENDIX A

the past food was shipped to the Kronstadt warehouses for a

whole month. So great is the distrust of the sailors by the So

viet authorities that a Red Army infantry regiment has been

assigned to guard the routes to Kronstadt across the ice which

covers the Finnish Gulf at the present time. But, in the event

of an uprising, this regiment will not be able to offer the

sailors any serious opposition, for if the rising is properly

prepared, the regiment will be taken unawares by the sailors.

The seizure of authority over the fleet and over the fortifica

tions of Kronstadt itself will insure the rebellion's ascendancy

over all other forts not situated in the immediate vicinity

of Kotlin Island. The artillery of these forts have an angle

of fire which will not enable them to shoot at Kronstadt,

whereas the batteries of Kronstadt are able to direct their

fire at the forts ( Fort "Obruchev," which rose in rebellion in

May 1 9 1 9, surrendered half an hour after the Kronstadt

batteries opened fire on it) .

The only conceivable military resistance to the uprising

immediately after it has begun would be for the Bolsheviks

to open fire on Kronstadt from the batteries of Krasnaya

Gorka ( the fort situated on the mainland on the southern

coast of the Finnish Gulf) . But the artillery of Krasnaya

Gorka is completely powerless before the artillery of the

ships and batteries of Kronstadt. On the ships in Kronstadt

there are at least 32 twelve-inch and 8 ten-inch guns ( not

counting the guns of smaller caliber, about whose condition

there is no reliable information ) . On Krasnaya Gorka there

are only 8 twelve-inch and 4 eight-inch guns; the rest of the

guns of Krasnaya Gorka are of insufficient caliber to be of

harm to Kronstadt. In addition, the entire supply of shells

for the artillery of Kronstadt, Krasnaya Gorka, and the Baltic

Fleet are kept in the powder magazines of Kronstadt and

will thus be in rebel hands. Therefore, the Bolsheviks will

not be able to suppress the uprising in Kronstadt by artillery

fire from the batteries of Krasnaya Gorka. On the contrary,

236

SECRET MEMORANDUM ON KRONSTADT

one must assume that, in case of an artillery duel between Krasnaya Gorka and Kronstadt, the latter will win ( the rising at Krasnaya Gorka in May [June] 1 9 1 9 was suppressed by Kronstadt after a four-hour bombardment which leveled all the buildings in the Krasnaya Gorka area-the Bolsheviks themselves forbade firing directly at the Krasnaya Gorka batteries in order to preserve them for later use) .

From the above it is clear that exceptionally favorable circumstances exist for the success of a Kronstadt uprising : ( 1 ) the presence of a closely knit group of energetic organizers for the rising; ( 2 ) a corresponding inclination towards rebellion among the sailors ; ( 3 ) the small area of operations delimited by Kronstadt's narrow contours, which will insure the total success of the uprising; and (4) the possibility of preparing the rising in full secrecy, which is afforded by Kronstadt's isolation from Russia and by the homogeneity and solidarity among the sailors.

If the rebellion is successful, the Bolsheviks, having neither combat-ready ships outside of Kronstadt nor the possibility of concentrating land-based artillery of sufficient power to silence the Kronstadt batteries ( particularly in view of Krasnaya Gorka's uselessness against them) , will not be in a position to take Kronstadt by shore bombardment or by a coordinated troop landing.1 It is noteworthy, moreover, that the Kronstadt Fortress and the operational fleet is equipped with anti-invasion artillery so numerous as to create an impenetrable blanket of fire. In order to carry out a landing, it would first be necessary to silence this artillery, a task which the Bolsheviks will be powerless to carry out in view of the support that the heavy guns of Kronstadt and of its fleet will give to the anti-invasion artillery.

In view of the above, the military situation in Kronstadt following the uprising may be regarded as completely secure,

1 The autho r of the memorandum assumes that the rising will occur after the ice has melted .

237

APPENDIX A

and the base will be able to hold out as long as it has to.

However, the internal living conditions after the rebellion

may prove fatal for Kronstadt. There is enough food to last

only for a few days after the uprising. If Kronstadt is not

supplied immediately after the overturn, and if the future

supply of Kronstadt is not properly assured, then the in

evitable hunger will force Kronstadt to fall again under the

authority of the Bolsheviks. Russian anti-Bolshevik organiza

tions are not strong enough to solve this food problem and

are compelled to turn for aid to the French government.

In order to avoid any delay in supplying Kronstadt with

food immediately after the uprising, it is necessary that before

the appointed time appropriate stores of food be placed on

transport vessels which will wait in ports of the Baltic Sea

for orders to proceed to Kronstadt.

Apart from the surrender of Kronstadt to the Bolsheviks

if food is not provided, there arises the danger of a break

down of the morale among the rebels themselves, as a result

of which Bolshevik authority may be restored in Krondstadt.

Such a breakdown in fnorale would be inevitable if the in

surgent sailors were not to receive assurances of sympathy

and support from the outside, in particular from the Russian

Army comm anded by General Wrangel, and also if the sailors

were to feel isolated from the rest of Russia by sensing the

impossibility of a further development of the rebellion to

wards the overthrow of Soviet power in Russia itself.

In this regard, it would be extremely desirable that in

the shortest possible time after the rising is carried out

some French vessels should arrive in Kronstadt, symbolizing

the presence of French assistance. Even more desirable would

be the arrival in Kronstadt of some units of the Russian

Army. For the selection of such units, preference ought to be

given to the Russian Black Sea Fleet, now located in Bizerte,

for the arrival of Black Sea sailors to help the sailors of the

Baltic Fleet would arouse incomparable enthusiasm among

the latter.

238

SECRET MEMORANDUM ON KRONSTADT

It must also be kept in mind that one cannot count on

the orderly organization of authority in Kronstadt, especially

in the first days after the overturn, and that in this connection

the arrival of units of the Russian Army or fleet under Gen

eral Wrangel's command would have extremely beneficial

effects, inasmuch as all authority in Kronstadt would auto

matically devolve upon the ranking officer of these units.

Furthermore, if one assumes that military operations will

be launched from Kronstadt to overthrow Soviet authority

in Russia, then for this purpose also the dispatch to Kron

stadt of General Wrangel's Russian armed forces would be

needed. In connection with this, it is appropriate to mention

that for such operations-or merely for the threat of such

operations-Kronstadt can serve as an invulnerable base.

The nearest object of action from Kronstadt would be de

fenseless Petro grad, whose conquest would mean that half

the battle against the Bolsheviks shall have been won.

lf, however, a further campaign from Kronstadt against

Soviet Russia were for some reason deemed undesirable in

the near future, then the fact that Kronstadt had been forti

fied with anti-Bolshevik Russian' troops, acting in concert

with the French Command, would still have considerable

significance in the development of the overall military and

political situation in Europe during the course of the coming

spring.

It is necessary, however, to bear in mind that if the initial

success of the rising in Kronstadt is cut short because of the

inadequate supply of Kronstadt with food, or because of the

demoralization of the Baltic sailors and the Kronstadt gar

rison for lack of moral and military support, then a situation

will obtain in which Soviet authority is not weakened but

strengthened and its enemies discredited.

In view of the above, Russian anti-Bolshevik organizations

should hold the position that they must refrain from con

tributing to the success of the Kronstadt rebellion if they do

not have the full assurance that the French government has

239

APPENDIX A

decided to take the appropriate steps in this regard, in par

ticular: (1) has taken upon itself to provide financial sup

port for the preparation of the uprising, which for a favorable

outcome would require an exceedingly small sum, perhaps

in the neighborhood. of 200 thousand francs; (2) has taken

upon itself the further financing of Kronstadt after the over

turn has been carried out; (3) has taken steps to supply

Kronstadt with food and has assured the arrival of the first

food deliveries immediately after the overturn in Kronstadt

has been accomplished; and (4) has declared its agreement

to the arrival in Kronstadt after the revolt of French military

vessels and also of army and navy units from the armed

forces of General Wrangel.

In connection with the above, one must not forget that

even if the French Command and the Russian anti-Bolshevik

organizations do not take part in the preparation and direc

tion of the uprising, a revolt in Kronstadt will take place all

the same during the coming spring, but after a brief period

of success it will be doomed to failure. The latter would

greatly strengthen the prestige of Soviet authority and de

prive its enemies of a very rare opportunity-an opportunity

that probably will not be repeated-to seize Kronstadt and

inflict upon Bolshevism the heaviest of blows, from which

it may not recover.

If the French government should agree in principle to the

considerations presented above, then it would be desirable

for it to designate an individual with whom representatives

of the rebellion's organizers can enter into more detailed

agreements on this subject and to whom they may communi

cate the details of the plan of the uprising and further ac

tions, as well as more exact information concerning the

funds required for the organization and further financing of

the uprising.

240

Appendix B

What We Are Fighting For*

After carrying out the October Revolution, the working

class had hoped to achieve its emancipation. But the result

was an even greater enslavement of the human personality.

The power of the police and gendarme monarchy passed into

the hands of the Communist usurpers, who, instead of giving

the people freedom, instilled in them the constant fear of

falling into the torture chambers of the Cheka, which in

their horrors far exceed the gendarme administration of the

tsarist regime. The bayonets, bullets, and gruff commands of

the Cheka oprichniki-these are what the workingman of

Soviet Russia has won after so much struggle and suffering.

The glorious emblem of the workers' state-the sickle and

hammer-has in fact been replaced by the Communist au

thorities with the bayonet and barred window, for the sake

of maintaining the calm and carefree life of the new bureauc

racy of Communist commissars and functionaries.

But most infamous and criminal of all is the moral servi

tude which the Communists have inaugurated: they have laid

their hands also on the inner world of the toilers, forcing

them to think in the Communist way. With the help of the

bureaucratized trade unions, they have fastened the workers

to their benches, so that labor has become not a joy but a

new form of slavery. To the protests of the peasants, ex

pressed in spontaneous uprisings, and those of the workers,

whose living conditions have driven them out on strike, they

answer with mass executions and bloodletting, in which they

have not been surpassed even by the tsarist generals. Russia

of the toilers, the first to raise the red banner of labor's eman

cipation, is drenched in the blood of those martyred for the

* "Za chto my boremsia," lzvestiia Vremennogo Revoliutsionnogo Komiteta, March 8, 1921, in Pravda 0 Kronshtadte, pp. 82-84.

(Translated by the author.)

241

APPENDIX B

glory of Communist domination. In this sea of blood, the

Communists are drowning all the great and glowing pledges

and watchwords of the workers' revolution. The picture has

been drawn more and more sharply, and now it is clear that

the Russian Communist party is not the defender of the

toilers that it pretends to be. The interests of the working

people are alien to it. Having gained power, it is afraid only

of losing it, and therefore deems every means permissible:

slander, violence, deceit, murder, vengeance upon the fami

lies of the rebels.

The long-suffering patience of the toilers is at an end.

Here and there the land is lit up by the fires of insurrection

in a struggle against oppression and violence. Strikes by the

workers have flared up, but the Bolshevik okhrana agents

have not been asleep and have taken every measure to fore

stall and suppress the inevitable third revolution. But it has

come nevertheless, and it is being made by the hands of the

toilers themselves. The generals of Communism see clearly

that it is the people who have risen, convinced that the ideas

of socialism have been betrayed. Yet, trembling for their

skins and aware that there is no escape from the wrath of the

workers, they still try, with the help of their oprichniki, to

terrorize the rebels with prison, firing-squads, and other

atrocities. But life under the yoke of the Communist dictator

ship has become more terrible than death.

The rebellious working people understand that there is no

middle ground in the struggle against the Communists and

the new serfdom that they have erected. One must go on to

the end. They give the appearance of making concessions: in

Petrograd province roadblock detachments have been re

moved and 10 million gold rubles have been allotted for the

purchase of foodstuffs from abroad. But one must not be

deceived, for behind this bait is concealed the iron hand of

the master, the dictator, who aims to be repaid a hundred

fold for his concessions once calm is restored.

242

WHAT WE ARE FIGHTING FOR

No, there can be no middle ground. Victory or death!

The example is being set by Red Kronstadt, menace of coun

terrevolutionaries of the right and of the left. Here the new

revolutionary step forward has been taken. Here is raised

the banner of rebellion against the three-year-old violence

and oppression of Communist rule, which has put in the

shade the three-hundred-year yoke of monarchism. Here in

Kronstadt has been laid the first stone of the third revolu

tion, striking the last fetters from the laboring masses and

opening a broad new road for socialist creativity.

This new revolution will also rouse the laboring masses

of the East and of the West, by serving as an example of

the new socialist construction as opposed to the bureaucratic

Communist "creativity." The laboring masses abroad will

see with their own eyes that everything created here until

now by the will of the workers and peasants was not social

ism. Without a single shot, without a drop of blood, the

first step has been taken. The toilers do not need blood.

They will shed it only at a moment of self-defense. In spite

of all the outrageous acts of the Communists, we have enough

restraint to confine ourselves only to isolating them from

public life so that their malicious and false agitation will not

hinder our revolutionary work.

The workers and peasants steadfastly march forward, leav

ing behind them the Constituent Assembly, with its bourgeois

regime, and the dictatorship of the Communist party, with

its Cheka and its state capitalism, whose hangman's noose en

circles the necks of the laboring masses and threatens to

strangle them to death. The present overturn at last gives

the toilers the opportunity to have their freely elected soviets,

operating without the slightest force of party pressure, and

to remake the bureaucratized trade unions into free associa

tions of workers, peasants, and the laboring intelligentsia.

At last the policeman's club of the Communist autocracy has

been broken.

243

Appendix C

Socialism in Quotation Marks*

In making the October Revolution, the sailors and Red

soldiers, the workers and peasants spilled their blood for

the power of the soviets, for the creation of a toilers' Re

public. The Communist party paid close attention to the

attitudes of the masses. Having inscribed on its banner allur

ing slogans which stirred up the workers, it drew them into

its camp and promised to lead them into the shining King

dom of Socialism, which only the Bolsheviks knew how

to erect.

Naturally, a boundless joy seized hold of the workers and

peasants. "At last the slavery we endured under the yoke of

the landlords and capitalists is passing into legend," they

thought. It seemed as if the time of free labor in the fields,

factories, and workshops had come. It seemed as if all power

had passed into the hands of the toilers.

By skillful propaganda, the children of the working people

were drawn into the ranks of the party, where they were

shackled with severe discipline. Then, feeling themselves

strong enough, the Communists first removed from power

the socialists of other tendencies; then they pushed the

workers and peasants themselves from the helm of the ship

of state, all the while continuing to rule the country in their

name. For the power which they stole, the Communists sub

stituted the arbitrary rule of the commissars over the body

and soul of the citizens of Soviet Russia. Against all reason

and contrary to the will of the toilers, they began persistently

to build state socialism, with slaves instead of free labor.

Having disorganized production under "workers' control,"

the Bolsheviks proceeded to nationalize the factories and

* "Sotsializm v kavychkakh," hvestiia Vremennogo Revoliutsion

nogo Komiteta, March 16, 1921, in Pravda 0 Kronshtadte, pp. 172-

74. (Translated by the author.)

244

SOCIALISM IN QUOTATION MARKS

shops. From a slave of the capitalist the worker was trans

formed into a slave of state enterprises. Soon this no longer

sufficed, so they planned to introduce the speedup system of

labor-the Taylor system. The whole laboring peasantry was

declared the enemy of the people and identified with the

kulaks. With great energy the Communists set about ruin

ing the peasants, busying themselves with the creation of

state farms-the estates of the new landlord, the state. This

is what the peasants have received from the socialism of the

Bolsheviks instead of the free use of their newly won lands.

In exchange for requisitioned grain and confiscated cows

and horses, they got Cheka raids and firing squads. A fine

system of exchange in a workers' state-lead and bayonets

for bread!

The life of the citizen became hopelessly monotonous

and routine. One lived according to the timetables established

by the powers that be. Instead of the free development of

the individual personality and a free laboring life, there

emerged an extraordinary and unprecedented slavery. All

independent thought, all just criticism of the acts of the crim

inal rulers became crimes punished by imprisonment and

sometimes even by execution. In a "socialist society" capital

punishment, that desecration of human dignity, began to

flourish.

Such is the shining kingdom of socialism to which the

dictatorship of the Communist party has brought us. We

have obtained state socialism with soviets of functionaries

who vote obediently according to the dictates of the party

committee and its infallible commissars. The slogan "He

who does not work shall not eat" has been twisted by the

new "soviet" order into "Everything for the commissars."

For the workers, peasants, and laboring intelligentsia there

remains only cheerless and unremitting toil in a prison en

vironment.

The situation has become intolerable, and Revolutionary

245

APPENDIX C

Kronstadt has been the first to break the chains and the iron

bars of this prison. It is fighting for a different kind of social

ism, for a Soviet Republic of the toilers, in which the pro

ducer himself will be the sole master and can dispose of his

products as he sees fit.

246

Annotated Bibliography

ARCHIVES

Archive of Russian and East European History and Culture,

Columbia University. The archives of the Russian National

Committee contain the Secret Memorandum on organizing

an uprising in Kronstadt ("Dokladnaia zapiska po voprosu

ob organizatsii vosstaniia v Kronshtadte") and other

materials reflecting emigre activities around the time of

the rebellion. In addition, the Columbia Archive houses a

number of valuable memoirs and documents relating to

Kronstadt by contemporaries inside Russia. Of these the

most important are: G. A. Cheremshansky, "Kronshtadt

skoe, vosstanie, 28 fevralia-18 marta 1921"; D. Daragan

and N. Zhigulev, "Kronshtadtskoe vosstanie 1921 g."; "K

vospominaniiam matrosa sluzhby 1914 goda"; "Khod

sobytii v Petrograde vo vremia Kronshtadtskogo voss

taniia," March 1921; and "0 raskrytom v Petrograde

zagovorov protiv Sovetskoi vlasti," Presidium of Vecheka,

August 29, 1921.

The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, Stan

ford University. Much relevant material is to be found in

the archives of M. N. Giers, V. A. Maklakov, General E.

K. Miller, and Baron P. N. Wrangel. The following items

are particularly significant: (1) In the Giers Archives,

letters from Professor D. D. Grimm to M. N. Giers, March

15 and 31, 1921; letter from Professor G. F. Tseidler to

President of Russian Red Cross, March 20, 1921; and

letters from S. M. Petrichenko and others to Professor

Grimm and General WrangeJ, May 31, 1921. (2) In the

:Miller Archives, "Kak nachalos' vosstanie v Kronshtadte,"

March 12, 1921. ( 3) In the general collection of the

Hoover Library, "Interv'iu s chlenami Vremennogo Revo

liutsionnogo Komiteta (s matrosami 'Petropavlovska' Ia-

247


kovenko, Karpenko i Arkhipovym)"; "Prichiny, povody,

techenie i otsenka Kronshtadtskikh sobytii"; and "Svede

niia iz Petrograda ot 12 aprelia: Kronshtadt i otgoloski

ego vosstaniia," April 12, 1921.

The National Archives of the United States, Washington, D.C. There are pertinent diplomatic papers in State Department,

Records Relating to Internal Affairs of Russia and the

Soviet Union, 1910-1929, File'

Number 861.00, espe

cially the well-informed dispatches of Harold B. Quar

ton, the American consul in Viborg. The most noteworthy

of these are: (1) two reports of April 23, 1921 to the

Secretary of State: "Analysis of Foreign Assistance Ren

dered to the Cronstadt Revolution" and "Cause, Progress

and Results of Cronstadt Events" (861.00/8619) ; and

(2) an interview with Petrichenko by Edmond Stratton,

an American journalist in Finland, March 19, 1921, in

Quarton to Secretary of State, April 9, 1921 (861.00/

8470) .

The Trotsky Archives, Harvard University. These, unfortu

nately, contain only one item bearing directly on the re

bellion, a message from Trotsky to Lenin, dated March

15, 1921 (T 647) , regarding the need to dispel the "wild

rumors about Kronstadt." There are, however, a number

of firsthand reports on the peasant risings of the period.

In addition to the above, the archives of Professor D. D.

Grimm, privately held in Paris, are also of considerable

value, particularly with regard to the activities of the

emigres during and after the rebellion.

BOOKS, PAMPHLETS, AND ARTICLES

Abramovitch, Raphael R. The Soviet Revolution, 1917-1939.

New York, 1962. A useful study by a leading Menshevik.

Alexander, Hunter. "The Kronstadt Revolt of 1921 and

Stefan Petrichenko." Ukrainian Quarterly, XXIII, Autumn

1967, 255-63.

248


Antonovshchina. Tambov, 1923. A valuable collection of

articles and materials on the Antonov movement.

Anweiler, Oskar. Die Riitebewegz:ng ill Russland, 1905-19] 1.

Leiden, 1958. A pioneering study of the soviets.

Avrich, Paul. "The Bolshevik Revolution and Workers'

Control in Russian Industry." Slavic Review, XXII, �/Iarch

1963, 47-63.

---. The Russian Anarchists. Princeton, 1967.

Balabanoff, Angelica. Impressions of Lenin. Ann Arbor,

1964.

---. Aiy Life as a Rebel. New York, 1938. Reminis

cences by the first secretary of the Communist Interna

tional.

Baltiiskie moriaki v podgotovke i proredenii Velikoi Oktiabr'

skoi sotsialisticheskoi revofiutsii. Ed. P. N. Mordvinov.

Jv1oscow, 1957.

Baltiiskii flot v Oktiabr'skoi revoliutsii i grazjzdanskoi voine.

Ed. A. K. Drezen. Leningrad, 1932.

Barmine, Alexander. One Who Sur vi� 'ed. New York, 1945.

Berkman, Alexan:ier. The "A nfi-Climax." Berlin, 1925. Con

cluding Chapter of Berkman's diary, The Bo!she�'ik ,Hyth.

---. The Bolshe\'ik A1ytlz (Dairy 19]0-19]]). New

York, 1925. Absorbing reminiscences by a \yell-known

anarchist who was in Petrograd at the time of the Kron

stadt rising.

---. The Kron'jiadt Re!�ellion. Berlin, 1922. A brief

but significant account of the rising from the ar.archist

point of view.

Bogdanov, A. V. A!oriaki-baltiitsy v 1917 g. fvloscow, 1955.

Bogdanov, 1\1. A. Ra::.grom ::.ap{[.!llosioirskogo kuiatsko

eserovskogo miate::.lia 19] J g. Tiumen', 1961

Boldin, P. I. "ivten'sheviki v Kronshtadtskom miatezhe,"

Krasnaia Letopis', 1931, No. 3, pp. 5- 3 1.

Browder, R. P. and A. F. Keren�:ky, eds. The Russiun Pro

visional Government, 1917. 3 vols., Stanford, 1961.

249


Bunyan, James. The Origin of Forced Labor in the Soviet

State, 1917-1921: Documents and Materials. Baltimore,

1967.

Carr, Edward Hallett. The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923.

3 vols., New York, 1951-1953. Says little about Kron

stadt, but is a monumental study of Bolshevik theory and

practice during the revolutionary period.

Carroll, E. Malcolm. Soviet Communism and Western Opin

ion, 1919-1921. Chapel Hill, 1965.

Chamberlin, William Henry. The Russian Revolution, 1917-

1921.2 vols., New York, 1935. An outstanding history of

the revolution, which retains its value more than thirty

years after its original publication.

Ciliga, Anton. The Kronstadt Revolt. London, 1942. A brief

but penetrating analysis.

Cohn, Norman. Warrant for Genocide. London, 1967.

Crossman, Richard, ed. The God That Failed. New York,

1950.

Dallin, David and Boris Nicolaevsky . Forced Labor in Soviet

Russia. New Haven, 1947.

Dan, F. I. Dva goda skitanii (1919-1921). Berlin, 1922. An important memoir by a leading Menshevik imprisoned in

Petrograd during the rising.

Daniels, Robert V. The Conscience of the Revolution: Com

munist Opposition in Soviet Russia. Cambridge, Mass.,

1960. A major study of the opposition movements within

the Communist party.

---. "The Kronstadt Revolt of 1921: A Study in the

Dynamics of Revolution." American Slavic and East Euro

pean Review, x, December 1951,241-54. A useful article.

Degras, Jane, ed. The Communist International, 1919-1943.

3 vols., London, 1956-1965.

Desiatyi s"ezd RKP(b), mart 1921 goda. Moscow, 1963.

Minutes of the dramatic Tenth Party Congress, which met

in Moscow at the time of the rebellion.

250


Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921.

New York, 1954. The first volume of a classic three-vol

ume biography.

---. Soviet Trade Unions. London, 1950. Has a good

brief discussion of the trade-union controversy of 1920-

1921.

Dewar, Margaret. Labour Policy in the USSR, 1917-1928.

London, 1956.

Dukes, Paul. Red Dusk and the Morrow. New York, 1922.

---. The Story of "ST 25." London, 1938.

Dybenko, P. E. Iz nedr tsarskogo {lota k velikomu Oktiabriu.

Moscow, 1928.

Erickson, John. The Soviet High Command. London, 1962.

An outstanding history of the emergence of the Soviet

armed forces.

Fainsod, Merle. Smolensk under Soviet Rule. Cambridge,

Mass., 1958.

Fedeli, Ugo. Dalla insurrezione dei eontadini in Ueraina alia

rivolta di Cronstadt. Milan, 1950.

Fischer, Louis. The Soviets in World Affairs. 2 vols., Prince

ton, 1951.

Fisher, Harold H. The Famine in Soviet Russia, 1919-1923.

New York, 1927.

Flerovskii, I. P. Bol'shevistskii Kronshtadt v 1917 godu (po

liehnym vospominaniiam). Leningrad, 1957.

---. "Iiul'skii politicheskii urok," Proletarskaia Revo

liutsiia, 1926, No. 7, pp. 57-89.

---. "Miatezh mobilizovannykh matrosov v Peterburge

14 oktiabria 19 18 g.," Proletarskaia Revoliutsiia, 1926,

No. 8, pp. 2 18-37. A revealing study of a precursor of

the 1921 mutiny.

Genkina, E. B. Perekhod Sovetskogo gosudarstva k no VOL ekonomieheskol politike (1921-1922). Moscow, 1954.

---. "V. I. Lenin i perekhod k novoi ekonomicheskoi

politike," Voprosy IstorU, 1964, No. 5, pp. 3-27.

251

A/VI\'OLjTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Goldman, Emma. Lidng A1y Life. New York, 1934. A

memorable autobiography by the ��o��_anarchist, with

vivid impre:;sions of the KrO!lstadt' rising.

---. Trotsky Protests Too Much. Glasgow, 1938. A reply to Trotsky on Kronstadt.

Golinkov, D. L. "Razgrom ochagov vnutrennei kontrrevo

liutsii v Sovetskoi Rossii," Voprosy Istoril, 1968, No.1,

pp. ] 33-49.

Goneniia na anarkhi:m v Sovetskoi Rossii. Berlin, 1922.

Crazhdanskaia l'oina, 1918-1921. 3 vo1s., I\,loscow, 1928-

1930. Volume I has an article on the assault against

Kronstadt by S. Uritsky, a Bobhevik military leader, which

includes a useful military map.

Great Britain, Documents 011 British Foreign Policy, 1919-

J939. Fir:;t Series, XII, London, 1962.

Iarchuk, E. Krol1shtadt v russkoi revoliutsii. New York, 1923.

An anarchist account of Kronstadt in 19 17.

/z istorii Vserossiiskoi chrezvychainoi komissii, 1917-1921

gg. Sbornik dokumel1tov. Moscow, 1958:

Kak tambovskie krest'iane boriatsfa za svobodu. n.p., 1921.

An SR pamph!et from the jacquerie in Tambov.

Katkov, George. "The Kronstadt Rising," St. Antony's Pa

pers, No.6, London, ] 959, pp. 9-74. A pioneering study.

Kogan, F. Kronshtadt v 1905-1906 gg. Moscow, 1926.

Kolbin, I. N. "Kronshtadt ot fevralia do kornilov:okikh dnei,"

Krasnaia Letopis', ] 927, No. 2, pp. 134-6 1.

---. Kronshtadt v 1917 godu. Moscow, 1932.

Kollontai, A!exandra. The Workers' Opposition in Russia.

Chicago, 1921.

KorabJev, Iu. Revoliutsionnye vosstaniia na Baltike v 1905-

1906 gg. Leningrad, 1956.

Kornatovskii, N. A. , ed. Kronshtadtskii miatezh: sbornik

sta!ei, vospominanii i dokumentov. Leningrad, 193]. A

basic collection of reminiscences and documents 0:1 the

rising.

252

AY'"OTATED BIBLIOGRAPHl"

Kritsman, L. N. Geroicheskii period \'elikoi russkoi re\'o!

iutsii. 2nd edn .. �1o::cow, 1926. A probing study of \Var

COfTI!T!uni"m. Krollshtadt: krarkii P!!!c:·oditcl'. Ed. I. P. Vinokuro\" et a1.

Leningrad. 1963.

"Kronshtadtskoe vosstanie 1906 g.," Krasnyi A,.khi�·, 1936,

No. 4, pp. 91-116.

Kroflshtadtskoe \'osstaflie , 1921-1956. Berlin, 1956. Of

little scholarly value.

Kuz'min, �/l. Kroflsiztadtskii miate;}l. Leningrad. 1931. A popular history of limited use to the specialist.

Kuznetsov, V. I:: \"osponzinanii po!itrabotnika. ::\IoscO\v, 1930.

Lazarevich [no first name]. "Kronshtadtskoe vosstanie,"

Bor'ba. 1921, Nos. 1-2. pp. 3-8. A useful analysis from

the SR viewpoint.

Leites. K. R ecent ECtmon;ic Dc\"c!opn;ci1ls ill Russia. Lon

don, 1922.

Lenin. V. 1. Po/noc sohranie s()c/Zincl1ii. 5th edn .. 55 vols.,

:Moscmv. 1958-1965.

Lentsner, L. A. Krol1shtadt \. 1905-1906 gg.: \·ospominaniia.

Moscow, 1956.

Leonidov. O. Likl'idatsiia Krollshtadtskogo l7Iiate::ha (mart

1921 g.). �/loscow, 1939. A Stalinist tract.

Liddell H::lrt. B. H .. ed. The Red AmIY. New York, 1956.

Lukomskii. A. S. Vospomil1aniia. 2 vols .. Berlin. 1922.

Lur'e, M. L .. ed. "Kronshtadt�kie moriaki v iiul'skom vystu-

plenii 1917 goda." Krasllaia Letopis·. 1932. No.3, pp. 76-

105.

---. "Kronshtadtskii miatezh 1921 goda v Sovetskoi i

beloi literature i pechati:' Krasnaia Letopis·. 1931. No. 2, pp. 225-40. A useful bibliographical sun"ey.

---. "Otsenka Kronshtadtskogo miatezha v proizvedeni

iakh V. I. Lenina." KrasJ1aia Leto!�is·. 1931. No. 3, pp.

166-75. Lenin's statements about the revolt.

253


Macdonald, Dwight. "Kronstadt Again," The New Interna

tional, October 1939, pp. 315-16.

---. "Once More: Kronstadt," The New International,

July 1938, pp. 212-14. An incisive reply to Trotsky.

Makhno, N. I. "Pamiati Kronshtadtskogo vosstaniia," Delo

Truda, 1926, No. 10, pp. 3-4.

Maximofi, G. P. The Guillotine at Work. Chicago, 1940.

Medvedev, V. K. "Kronshtadt v iiul'skie dni 1917 goda,"

Istoricheskie Zapiski, XLII, 1953, 262-75.

Mett, Ida. La Commune de Cronstadt: Crepuscule sanglant

des Soviets. Paris, 1949. A brief but well-informed and

sensitive history from the anarchist perspective. There is a

slightly abridged English translation: The Kronstadt Com

mune, London, 1967, published by the Solidarity Press.

Miliukov, P. N. Russia Today and Tomorrow. New York,

1922.

Morizet, Andre. Chez Lenine et Trotski, Moscou 1921.

Paris, 1922.

Nestroev, G. Maksimalizm i bol'shevizm. Moscow, 1919.

Nikulin, L. V. Tukhachevskii. Moscow, 1964.

"Obrazovanie severo-zapadno go Pravitel'stva," Arkhiv rus-

skoi revoliutsii, I, 1922, 295-308.

Oktiabr'skii shkval (Moriaki Baltiiskogo {lota v 1917 godu).

Eds. P. F. Kudelli and I. V. Egorov. Leningrad, 1927.

Osinskii, N. [Y. V. Obolenskii]. Gosudarstvennoe reguliro

vanie krest'ianskogo khoziaistva. Moscow, 1920.

Parvilahti, Unto. Beria's Gardens: A Slave Laborer's Experi

ences in the Soviet Utopia. New York, 1960.

Pearce, Brian. "1921 and All That." Labour Review, v,

October-November 1960, 84-92.

Petrash, V. V. Moriaki Baltiiskogo {lota v bor'be za pobedu

Oktiabria. Leningrad, 1966.

Petrichenko, S. M. "0 prichinakh Kronshtadtskogo vosstani

ia," Znamia Bor'by, Nos. 14-15, December 1925-January

1926, pp. 4-8.

254


Pravda 0 Kronshtadtskikh sobytiiakh. n.p., 1921.

This and preceding entry are important accounts of the

rising by its principal leader.

Petrov-Skitaletz, E. The Kronstadt Thesis for a Free Russian

Government. New York, 1964.

Poliakov, Iu. A. Perekhod k nepu i Sovetskoe krest'ianstvo .

. Moscow, 1967. An informative work on the Russian

peasantry at the time of the rising.

Pollack, Emanuel. The Kronstadt Rebellion. New York,

1959. Leans heavily on Berkman and one or two other

works.

Pravda 0 Kronshtadte. Prague, 1921. The most important

source, containing all issues of the rebel daily newspaper.

Prokopovitch, S. N. The Economic Condition of Soviet Rus

sia. London, 1924.

Pukhov, A. S. Baltiiskii fiot na zashchite Petrograda (1919

g.). Moscow, 1958.

---. Kronshtadtskii miatezh v 1921 g. Leningrad, 1931.

The best Soviet account. A serialized version appeared, in

somewhat different form, in Krasnaia Letopis' in 1930-

1931.

Pukhov, G. S. Kak vooruzhalsia Petrograd. Moscow, 1933.

Rabinovich, S. E. "Delegaty la-go s"ezda RKP(b) pod

Kronshtadtom v 1921 godu," Krasnaia Letopis', 1931,

No. 2, pp. 22-55.

Rabinowitch, Alexander. Prelude to Revolution: The Petro

grad Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising. Bloomington,

1968.

Rabota eserov zagranitsei. Moscow, 1922. Contains letters by

SR expatriates who raised funds to aid the insurgents.

Rafail, M. A. Kronshtadtskii miatezh (/z dnevnika polit

rabotnika). n.p. [Kharkov], 1921. Memoirs of a delegate

from the Tenth Party Congress who volunteered for the

Kronstadt front.

255


Raskol'nikov, F. F. [Il'in]. Kronshtadt i Piter V 1917 godu.

Moscow, 1925.

Rotin, I. P. Stranitsa istorii partii. I\1oscow, 1958.

Schapiro, Leonard. The Communist Party of the Soviet

Union. New York, 1960. The best general history of the

party.

---. The Origin of the Communist Autocracy. Cam

bridge, Mass., 1956. An outstanding work, with a good

brief analysis of the rebellion.

Scheuer, Georg. Von Lenin bis . . . ? Die Geschichte einer

Konterrevolution. Vienna, 1954.

Serge, Victor. Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 1901-1941.

Trans. and ed. Peter Sedgwick. London, 1963. Absorbing

memoirs by a sympathetic critic of the rebellion.

---. "Once More: Kronstadt," The New International,

July 1938, pp. 2 1 1-12.

---. "Reply to Trotsky," The New International, Feb

ruary 1939, pp. 53-54.

Shelov, A. V. Istoricheskii ocherk kreposti Kronshtadt. Kron

stadt, 1904. A detailed account of Kronstadt's early

history.

Singleton, Seth. "The Tambov Revolt ( 1920-192 1)." Slavic

Review, xxv, September 1966, 497-512.

Slepkov, A. Kronshtadtskii miatezh. Moscow, 1928.

Smith, C. Jay. Finland and the Russian Revolution, 1917-

1922. Athens, Ga., 1958.

Sofinov, P. G. Istoricheskii povorot (perekhod k novoi

ekonomicheskoi politike). I\-loscow, 1964.

Soiuz S-R Maksimalistov. 0 rabochem kontrole. Moscow,

19 18.

---. Trudovaia sovetskaia respublika. Moscow, 19 18.

Steinberg, I. N. Ais ich Volkskommissar war. Munich, 1929.

In the Workshop of the Revolution. New York,

1953.

256


Sukhanov, N. N. The Russian Revolution, 1917. Trans. and

ed. Joel Carmichael. New York, 1955.

Todorskii, A. I. Marshal Tukhachevskii. Moscow, 1963.

Trifonov, I. la. Klassy i klassovaia bor' ba v SSSR v nachale

nepa (1921-1923 gg.). Vol. !: Bor'ba s vooruzhennoi

kulatskoi kontrrevoliutsiei. Leningrad, 1964. Has a full

bibliographical essay on the peasant revolts of 1920-1922.

Trotskii, L. D. "Eshche ob usmirenii Kronshtadta," Biulleten'

Oppozitsii, October 1938, p. 10. Translated into English

as "More on the Suppression of Kronstadt," The New

International, August 1938, pp. 249-50.

---. Kak vooruzhalas' revoliutsiia. 3 vols. in 5, Moscow,

1923-1925.

---. The Revolution Betrayed. New York, 1937.

---. "Shumikha vokrug Kronshtadta," Biulleten' Op-

pozitsii, May-June, 1938, pp. 22-26. Translated into Eng

lish as "Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt," The New Interna

tional, April 1938, pp. 103-106. This and first entry pre

sent Trotsky's defense of his role in the Kronstadt affair.

---. Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence.

New York, 1946.

Tseidler, G. 0 snabzhenii Peterburga. Viborg, 1921.

Tukhachevskii, M. N. "Bor'ba s kontrrevoliutsionnymi vos

staniiami," V oina i Revoliutsiia, 1926, No. 8, pp. 3-15.

On the suppression of Antonov.

Vardin, I. Revoliutsiia i men'shevizm. Moscow, 1925.

V ogne revoliutsii. Ed. L. Gurvich. Moscow, 1933.

Voennye moriaki v period pervoi russ/wi revoliutsii, 1905-

1907 gg. Ed. S. F. Naida. Moscow, 1955.

Voennye vosstaniia v Baltike v 1905-06 gg. Ed. A. K. Dre

zen. Moscow, 1933.

Voline [V. M. Eikhenbaum]. La Revolution inconnue (1917-

1921). Paris, 1943. Has an interesting section on the

rebellion from the anarchist standpoint.

257


Voronevskii, V. and N. Khenrikson. Kronshtadtskaia krepost'

-kliuch k Leningradu. Leningrad, 1926.

Voroshilov, K. E. "Iz istorii podavleniia Kronshtadtskogo

miatezha," Voenno-Istoricheskii Zhurnal, 1961, No. 3,

pp. 15-35.

Vos'moi vserossiiskii s" ezd sovetov rabochikh, krest'ianskikh,

krasnoarmeiskikh i kazach'ikh deputatov. Stenogra/icheskii

otchet (22-29 dekabria 1920 goda). Moscow, 1921.

White, D. Fedotoff. The Growth of the Red Army. Princeton,

1944. A valuable work by a well-informed ex-officer in

the Russian Imperial Navy. Has a good account of the

military side of the revolt.

Wollenberg, Erich. The Red Army. London, 1938.

Wrangel, P. N. the Memoirs of General Wrangel. London,

1930.

Wright, John G. The Truth About Kronstadt. New York,

1938. A defense of the Bolsheviks by a disciple of Trotsky.

Za 5 let, 1917-1922: sbornik Ts.K.R.K.P. Moscow, 1922.

Zhakovshchikov, K. Razgrom Kronshtadtskogo kontrrev

oliutsionnogo miatezha v 1921 godu. Leningrad, 1941. A

Stalinist history.

Zubelevich, Iu. Kronshtadt: V ospominaniia revoliutsionerki,

1906 god. Kronstadt, n.d.

CONTEMPORARY NEWSPAPERS AND JOURNALS

Daily Herald. London.

L'Echo de Paris.

Golos Rossii. Berlin.

Izvestiia Vremennogo Revoliutsionnogo Komiteta Matrosov,

Krasnoarmeitsev i Rabochikh gor. Kronshtadta. Kron

stadt.

Izvestiia Petrogradskogo Soveta Rabochikh i Krasnoarmei

skikh Deputatov. Petrograd.

Izvestiia V TsIK. Moscow.

258


Krasnaia Gazeta. Petrograd.

M aksimalist. Moscow.

Le Matin. Paris.

Narodnoe Delo. Reval.

New York Times.

New York Tribune.

Novaia Russkaia Zhizn'. Helsingfors.

N ovyi M ir. Berlin.

Obshchee Delo. Paris.

Petrogradskaia Pravda. Petrograd.

Poslednie N ovosti. Paris.

Pravda. Moscow.

Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia. Prague.

Rul'. Berlin.

Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik. Berlin.

The Times. London.

Voennoe Znanie. Moscow.

V olia Rossii. Prague.

259

Index

Akselrod, P. B . , 1 68 Allies, 1 29 , 1 3 6, 1 86 ; and

Russian emigres, 3, 96, 1 32 ; impose blockade, 7 , 2 2 , 1 63 ; intervention i n Russia, 7 , 1 04 ; relations with Bolsheviks, 7-8, 2 1 8- 1 9 ; accused of espionage, 4 1 ; and aid to rebels, 1 1 7 - 1 9 , 1 43 , 1 94

anarchists, 7, 64, 8 8 , 1 1 2 , 1 29 , 1 42-43 , 1 52, 1 62 , 1 67, 1 89-90, 2 2 6 ; arrest of, 3 2-3 3 , 47, 226 ; influence in Kronstadt, 57, 60-6 1 , 1 68-7 1 , 1 7 3 ; oppose Brest-Litovsk treaty, 6 3 ; in Petropavlovsk resolution, 73 ; try to mediate dispute, 1 47-48 ; on crushing of revolt, 2 1 2

anarcho-syndicalists, see

syndicalism Anchor Square, as revolutionary

forum, 53, 55, 57-59, 1 69 ; in Kronstadt rising, 76-80, 82, 86, 1 0 1 , 1 1 0- 1 1 , 1 3 5 -3 6, 1 7 5 ; renamed, 2 1 3

anti-Semitism, 1 2 , 1 5 , 29, 36, 46, 1 42, 1 97 ; among rebels, 1 55 , 1 7 8-80

Antonov, A. S . , revolt of, 1 4- 1 6, 2 1 4. See also peasants, risings of

Antselovich, N. M . , 3 8-3 9 Arkhipov, N., rebel leader, 92 Avrov, D. N., 39, 1 49

Baikov, rebel leader, 92-93 , 1 57 Bakhmetiev, B. A . , 1 1 8, 1 24 Bakunin, M . A., 1 7 3, 1 90 Baltic Fleet, 4. 4 1 . 64, 68,

97, 122; social composition of, 5, 8 8-90; at Kronstadt . 5�-54; in 1 9 1 7, 58-60; in Civil War,

62, 66; central committee of (Tsentrobalt), 63 ; ship committees of, 65-67 , 69, 225 ; "fleet opposition" in, 67-7 1 , 1 8 1 ; Bolsheviks in, 69, 94; Second Conference of Communists in, 70-7 1 , 97; anti-Semitism in, 1 7 9 ; reorganization of, 2 1 4, 225; and Secret Memorandum, 2 3 5, 2 3 8 . See also Pubalt

Batis, E. I . , 70, 1 85 Berkman, Alexander, criticizes

Bolsheviks, 3 2 ; on March 2 conference, 84; on Petrograd Soviet meeting, 1 42 ; appeals to Zinoviev, 1 47-48, 1 70 ; o n first assault, 1 52 ; on soviets, 1 6 1 ; on rebel morale, 20 1 ; on c rushing of rising, 2 1 2- 1 3 , 2 1 9,228

B lack Hundreds, 96 black market, 2 1 , 2 3 , 2 6, 43,

49, 1 66 Black Sea Fleet, 55, 70, 1 05- 1 06,

2 3 8 Bleikhman, I . S . , 1 69 Bolshevik Revolution, 1 1 ,33,

61 -62;65,9 1 , 94,99, 1 07, 1 49 , 1 61 ,24 1 ,244. See also Revolution of 1 9 1 7

Bolsheviks, 3 -5, 25, 29, 40, 44, 57, 89, 9 1 ,94, 1 1 9 , 1 3 3 , 1 3 6- 3 8 , 1 79 , 1 84, 1 9 3,2 1 2 , 2 1 8 ; foreign policy of, 7-8, 2 1 8- 1 9 ; and peasants, 1 0- 1 3, 1 6- 1 7; and War Communism, 1 6- 1 7 , 3 1 -32,34; and workers, 28-3 1 , 42, 65 ; disputes among, 29-3 3 ; in Kronstadt, 57, 60, 69,80-84,94-95 , 1 1 1 , 1 40, 1 58 , 1 80-88,208,2 1 3 ; military policy of, 65-67 ;

261

INDEX

in Baltic Fleet, 69, 94-99,

112; and Petropal'iovsk

resolution, 75-76; on White conspiracy, 95ff; take hostages, 99; charge Finnish complicity, 120; on Vilken, 122; intercept SR messages, 124, 132; and Secret Memorandum, 132;

negotiate with rebels, 140;

launch fi rst assault, 148-55;

violate truce, 155; criticized by rebels, 174-75,241-46;

purge of, 213-14; promise amnesty, 216. See also Tenth Congress of Communist Party

Bregman, L. A, 186,213

B rest-Litovsk, treaty of, 22,

63-64, 222-23

B riukhanov, N. P . , 19n

Brusilov, General A A., 99

Bubnov, A S., 195n, 232

Bukharin, N. 1., 130, 134

Burkser, Captain A. S. , 99, 145

Burtsev, V. L., 98, 104, 109,

115-17, 123

Butakov, Admiral G. I . , 59

Cheka, and peasant disorders, 14-15,223; and Petrograd strikes, 47, 71; suppresses opposition, 47-48, 169,226;

and Baltic sailors, 63, 66;

in Kronstadt, 86, 235; and National Center, 104; and Oranienbaum mutiny, 137;

combats rebels, 141, 148-49,

153, 193,230; denounced by rebels, 164-65, 167,241-45;

shoots prisoners, 215

Che rnov, V. M. , in 1917,

60: offers aid to rebels, 124-25, 132, 168,202

Ciliga, Anton, 231

Civil War. and Kronstadt sailors, 58, 62-65, 88. See

also War Communism

Communist International (Comintern), 178; Third Congress of, 130, 134;

Fourth Congress, of, 228

Communist p arty, see Bolsheviks Congress of National Union,

104-105, 128-29

Constituent Assembly, 36, 118,

181; and SR's, 44-45,168;

dispersal of, 62, 169; opposed by sailors, 75, 114, 162-63,

166,173,243; opposed by M aximalists, 171

Constitutional Democrats, see Kadets

Cossacks, 53-54, 65,174,189

Council of People's Commissars, 18,26,63

Czechoslovakia, Soviet occupation of, 4

Daily Herald, 109, 118-19

Dallin, D . J., 18,44

Dan, F. 1., 200, 216; criticizes Bolsheviks, 18; on soviets, 33; on food crisis, 37; on Petrograd strikes, 41-42, 47;

conducts propaganda, 43; at Eighth Congress of Soviets, 44; arrest of, 47; on Kozlovsky, 101; on Perepelkin, 215

Democratic Centralists, 17,33,

181, 195

Denikin, General A I . , 40, 89,

105,130,132,191,218

Denisov, N. Kh ., I 17

Deutscher, Isaac, on Trotsky, 145

Dukes, Paul, 104n

Dybenko, P. E. , 202; on Baltic sailors, 64, 66; on Petropavlovsk crew, 72;

appeals to rebels, 194;

denounces Pet richenko, 194;

appointed Kronstadt commander, 213

Dzerzhinsky, F. E., 230

262

INDEX

Echo de Paris, L', 96-97 Engels, Friedrich, 224, 230n Entente, see Allies Ermak, icebreaker, 1 0 1 ,

1 39n, 1 40

February Revolution, see

Revolution of 1 9 1 7 Fedko, I . F., 1 94, 1 97,202,

207, 2 1 4n Finland, 2 1 0; treaty with Russia,

8; Russian Red Cross in, 95; maintains neutrality, 1 1 9-20, 1 2 3 , 1 3 6, 2 1 9 ; General Staff of, 1 20-2 1 ; refugees in, 1 2 3 , 1 27-28,209,2 1 5- 1 7; appeals to League, 2 1 6

Fischer, Louis, 3 -4 Flerovsky, I. P . , 57-58 food requisitions

(prodrazverstka), 1 1 , 1 90; Lenin on, 9- 1 0, 1 9-2 1 ; resisted by peasants, 1 3 , 1 6; condemned by socialists, 1 8- 1 9,43 , 1 7 1 ; opposed by workers, 3 6-37; abandoned, 49, 1 98,22 1 -25; denounced by rebels, 64, 67, 75, 78, 1 64, 245

France, assists Wrangel, 20, 1 05; supports Poles, 83; and aid to rebels, 95, 1 05- 1 06, 1 09- 1 0, 1 1 8- 1 9, 1 2 1 , 1 26-27, 23 8-40

G allifet, General G aston de, 2 1 3 General Staff Academy, 1 94,

1 97,203,205 G odunov, Boris, Tsar, 1 2 Gold man, Emma, o n White

conspiracies, 48 ; on Petrograd intellectuals, 50 ; on Kalinin, 79; praises sailors, 9 1 ; on Petrograd Soviet meeting, 1 42-43; appeals to Zinoviev, 1 47-48, 1 70; on soviets, 1 60-6 1 ; on crushing of revolt, 2 1 2- 1 3 ;

on Kronstadt legacy, 228 G orky, Maxim, 48 G reat Britain, trade agreement

with Russia, 40, 1 1 8, 1 2 3, 1 3 3,2 1 2,2 1 9 ; aids Whites, 1 03- 1 04, 1 50; and Wrangel, 1 05; and aid to rebels, 1 1 8

G ribov, commissar, 2 1 3 G rigoriev, G . , 8 8 G rimm, D . D., 1 03- 1 04, 1 07 ;

and aid to rebels, 1 1 6, 1 22, 1 27-2 8, 1 3 2 ,2 1 2

Guchkov, A . I., 1 04

Harding, Warren G . , 1 1 7 , 1 3 3 Herzen, A. I . , 1 73 Hoover, Herbert c., 1 1 7 Hopkins, Red Cross official,

1 20n hostages, taken by Bolsheviks,

99, 1 46-47, 1 7 5, 1 87-88, 2 1 5; sailors protest, 1 66n, 242

House of Education, conference in, 8 1 -86, 1 0 1 , 1 57-59, 1 85

Hungarian uprising, 4

Ilyin, la. , 1 8 6-87 intellectuals, 2 9 , 3 3 , 47,50-5 1 ,

1 66, 1 72 , 1 7 5, 1 82 Ivan the Terrible, Tsar, 176n Izvestiia, rebel newspaper,

1 9 8-99 ; founded, 87;on Whites, 99, 1 1 3 - 1 4; on aims of rising, 1 1 2- 1 3 , 1 7 1 ; denounces Bolsh eviks, 1 3 1 , 1 53 , 1 60, 1 65-66, 1 75-77, 24 1 -46 ; on melting of ice, 1 36; on hostages, 1 47; and food distribution, 1 58 ; on soviets,

1 62; on grain requisitions, 1 64 ; on workers' control, 1 65,

244 ; criticizes Lenin, 1 77; and Kronstadt Communists, 1 84 ; distributed in Petrograd, 200

263

INDEX

Jews, see anti-Semitism July Days, 60-6 1, 72

Kabanov, A, 186 Kadets ( Constitutional

Democrats), 45, 1 14 , 123, 18 1; ministers murdered , 6 1; in National Center, 102- 104; and aid to rebels, 126-27, 132

Kalinin, M. I., 10- 1 1; addresses Petrograd workers, 48; at Anchor Square meeting, 76-8 1 , 135-36, 175; detained by sailors, 79, 84, 1 10- 1 1 ; denounces revolt, 143; death of, 232

Kamenev, L. B. , 133, 193, 203 Kamenev, S. S., 99, N4n, 203,

2 11 Kamensky, Petrograd Menshevik,

47 Kartashav, A V., founds

National Center, 103; settles in Paris, 104; chairman o f Russian National Committee, 104- 105, 109n

Katkov, George, 1 1 1 Kazansky, E. S . , 203 Kazukov, Petro grad Menshevik,

47 Kelley, Lieutenant R . , 139n,

152n, 2 11n Kerensky, A F., 6 1, 1 14, 1 1 8 ,

12 1, 124, 143 Khrushchev, N. S . , 3 Kilgast, F. V., rebel leader,

92-94, 125, 157, 180 Kokoshkin, F. F., 6 1 Kokovtsov, Count V . N . , 117 Ko1chak, Admiral A. V., 40,

105, 130, 132, 19 1, 2 18 Kollontai, A. M . , 30, 183 Komsomol, see Young

Communists Kornilov, General L. G . , 60-61,

72, 132

Korshunov, commissar, 84, 185 Kostromitinov, military

specialist, 99, 145 Kozlovsky, General A. N., 8 1,

146, 227; outlawed, 95, 99, 176; career of, 99; denies conspiracy, 99- 100; family taken hostage, 99, 2 15; role in rising, 100-10 1; message from Wrangel, 1 17; denounced by Bolsheviks, 132-33, 145; on taking Oranienbaum, 138; on mistrust of sailors, 139; flees to Finland, 208-209

Krasin, L. B., 8 , 133 Krasnaya Gorka, 86, 140-4 1,

152, 186, 230; and National Center, 103; mutiny at, 103-104, 14 1, 150, 237; and Secret Memorandum, 105, 236; Communists flee to, 1 85; shells Kronstadt, 20 1

Krasnov, General P. N. , 132 Kronstadt, as symbol, 3-4; as

springboard for invasion, 4 ; history of revolt in, 5 , 54ff; description of, 5 1-54; food situation in, 12 1-22, 15 1-52, 158, 20 1-202; thaw begins in, 136; defenses of, 150-5 1; and first assault, 152-55; and last assault, 202ff; legacy of, 228ff

Kronstadt sailors, ideology of, 5 , 78, 157ff, 172-7 8, 1 80-82; aroused by rumors, 37 , 7 1, 83, 85-86, 186; and Petrograd strikes, 5 1, 7 1-72, 7 5; in 1905 Revolution, 5 5-57 ; in 19 17 Revolution, 57-63; and murder of ministers, 6 1 ; and B rest-Litovsk treaty, 63-64; send delegates to Moscow, 68, 9 8 ; criticized by Bolsheviks, 88-89; nationalism of, 5, 88, 92-93, 173; and Secret Memorandum, 105; deny

264

'

INDEX

conspi racy, 1 1 3; in Finland, 1 22n, 1 23 , 200, 2 1 5- 1 7; and Truvor, 1 40; denounce Bolsheviks, 1 52-53; in up rising, 1 59fl'; morale of, 1 59-60, 1 9 8, 20 1 , 204, 2 3 8-3 9; oppose Constituer:t Assembly, 1 62-63 ; on War Com munism, 1 63 -65; denounce Zinoviev and Trotsky, 1 7 5-79; attitude toward Lenin, 1 76-79 ; treatment of Communists, 1 85-88; casualties of, 1 99-20 1 , 204, 2 1 1 . See also Bc:Jtic Fleet, Provisional Revolutionary Committee, "social revolution," soviets, "third revolution," "toilers' republic"

Kronstadt Soviet, 77, 1 1 1 , 1 43 , 2 1 3 ; i n 1 9 1 7 , 57-58, 1 69 ; term expires, 79-80, 8 3 -85; and Secret Memorand um, 2 3 5

Kropotkin, P. A., 1 7 1 kulaks, 3 , 1 2 , 1 64, 245 Kupolov, rebel leader, 92, 1 55 k ursallty ( m ilitary cadet s ) ,

and peasant disorders, 1 5, 2 2 3 ; and labor disturbances, 36, 3 8 -40, 46, 72; in Petropal"iol'sk resolution, 74; and Oranienbaum mutiny, 1 3 8; combat rebels, 1 4 1 , 1 48, 1 53, 205- 1 0 ; defections of, 1 53 -54, 1 97

Kuzmin, N. N., commissar, 1 1 1 ; warns of revo lt, 4 1 , 7 1 ; at Anchor Square meeting, 76-8 1 , 1 3 5-3 6 ; at March 2 conference, 82-85; rebels on, 99; arrested, 1 8 5, 1 87

"labor armies," 2 6-27, 42, 49, 223

Lamanov, A., 94, 1 7 1 Lashevich, M . N., 39, 4 1 Latsis, M . I. , 63

Lavrov, P . L., 1 7 3 League of Nations, 2 1 6 Left Communists, 63 Left SR's, 94, 1 1 2 , 1 7 1 ; in 1 9 1 7 ,

1 0; condemn War Communism, 1 8; on free soviets, 3 3 ; in Kronstadt, 57; oppose B rest-Litovsk treaty, 63 ; revolt of, 63

Lenin, V. I . , 1 03 , 1 1 5, 1 2 1 , 1 43, 1 74, 1 89-90, 228; on Kronstadt rising, 3, 5, 1 29-30, 1 3 4, 1 54-55, 1 77, 1 8 3 , 1 90-92, 2 2 1 -2 2 , 225-2 6; on transition to NEP, 5, 8 , 3 4 , 220-24, 2 2 8 ; at Eighth Congress of Soviets, 8 , 1 8-2 1 ; and food requisitions, 9, 1 98 ; and peasantry, 1 0- 1 4, 1 8-2 1 , ] 30, 222-24; defends War Communism , 20-2 1 ; on b u reaucrat ization, 2 8 n ; and trade union controversy, 3 0-3 1 ; on party disputes, 3 1 ; and "all power to soviets," 3 3 , 58 , 76; and workers, 36; criticized by SR's, 44; and murder of ministers, 6 1 ; and Bolshevik Revolution, 6 1 -62; on "going to sai l ors ," 63 ; and Petropa l'iol'sk resolution, 75; outlaws Kozlovsky, 95, 1 7 6 ; o n White conspiracy, 96; and W. B. Vanderl ip, 1 6 1 ; on Trotsky, 1 78 ; on Paris Commune, 220 ; on B altic Fleet, 225; on political opposition, 226; orders purge, 227 ; death of, 229

Lisy Nos, 1 4 1 , 1 51 -52,204-205 Lutovinov, Iu. Kh. , 30, 1 83 Lvov, Prince G . E., 1 2 1

Macdonald, Dwight, 2 3 0-3 1 Maisky, I. I . , 1 2 5

265

INDEX

M akhno, N. 1 . , 7 , 15, 8 8 , 18 1 Maklakov , V. A . , 1 16 Marx, Karl , 16 1, 172-73 ,

189, 220n, 224 Malin, Le, 96-97 , 109 Maximalists, see SR

Maximalists Mensheviks, 44, 95, 98, 1 13 ,

143 , 145, 162, 167, 170, 183 , 220n, 22 1, 224-25 ; evacuate Georgia, 7 , 226; oppose grain requisitions, 18 ; criticize "militarization of labor," 27 ; on soviets, 3 3 , 168 ; o n food c risis, 3 7 ; and Petrograd st rikes, 40-4 8 ; arrests of, 47-48, 226 ; i n Provisional RevolutionalY Committee, 94, 168 ; and aid to rebels, 12 3 , 125-26; and Kronstadt p rogram, 168

"mil itary special ists," 69, 8 1, 99, 146, 200, 2 14 ; in Civil War, 66; in uprising, 100- 10 1, 13 8-39, 14 8, 159, 2 19 ; and Russian emigres, 127 ; flee to Finland, 209

Miliukov, P. N., 104, 1 14- 15, 1 19 , 18 1

Miller, General E. K. , 1 17n, 118n, 132

Morizet, Andre, 1 3 4

Nabokov, V. D. , 104 National Cente r, 13 2 ; history

of, 102-10 3 ; and Krasnaya Gorka mutiny, 104 ; members arrested , 104 ; b ranches of. 104 ; and Congress of National Union, 104- 105 ; and Secret Memorandum, 105tf; reaction to rising, 1 15 ; and aid to rebe ls, 11 5tf, 126-2 9 ; and Pet rograd Fighting Organization , 12 8 ; and Petrichenko, 129

Nazi-Soviet pact, 3

Nepenin, Admi ral , 59-60 New Economic Policy ( N EP ) ,

5, 34, 49, 7 5 , 220-28 New York Times, 97, 1 15 Nicholas II , Tsar, 1 17, 176n Novikov, commissar, 86

Obshclzee Delo (The Common Cause ) , 97-98 , 102, 104, 109 , 1 15- 16, 120 , 123

Octobrists, 102, 104, 13 2 Oranienbaum, 5 3 , 87, 100- 10 1,

1 1 1, 14 1, 15 1, 154, 19 5-97, 206, 208, 2 19 , 230; Zinoviev in, 76; mutiny at, 102, 137-3 9 , 14 1, 186-87

O reshin, rebel leader, 92, 94 Osinsky, V. V. ( Obolensky ) ,

17, 223 Ososov , rebel leader, 92

Paris Commune, 57, 170, 2 13 , 2 19-20

Patrushev, rebel leader, 92 Pavlov, rebel leader, 92-9 3 ,

157, 209 , 2 14 peasants, and food requisitions,

9 - 10: and state farms, 1 1 ; hostility to Bolsheviks, 1 1- 16, 189-90 ; fear of Whites, 12- 13 ; anti-Semitism of, 12, 15, 46; risings of, 13 - 18, 135-36, 174, 189, 19 8 , 2 14, 2 18 , 223 ; and Osinsky's land p rogram, 17- 19 ; links with workers, 2 5 ; Lenin on, 13 0, 222-24

Perepelkin, G. P . , rebel leade r, 92; and Pelropa l'lO l·sk

resolution, 74 ; opposes SR

aid, 125 ; in charge of propaganda, 157 ; anarchist

leanings of, ) 69-70; taken

p risone� 209 , 2 14 ; shot, 2 15

Pe rvushin, F. , 186

Peter the Great, Tsar, 5 1, 55

266

INDEX

Peterhof, 5 1 , 1 54 ; conspiracy' at, 1 3 9 , 1 53-54, 1 97

Petliura, S. V . , 93 Petrichenko, S . M . , rebel leader,

92-9 3 , 1 46 ; criticizes Bolsheviks, 67-68, 7 8 ; o n Petro grad strikes, 72 ; and Petropav!ovsk resolution, 74, 7 8 ; at Anchor Square meeting, 7 8 ; description of, 8 1 -8 2 ; early career, 82, 90-9 1 ; chairs M arch 2 conference, 8 1 -8 5 ; heads Provisional Revolutionary Committee, 8 5 , 1 57 ; appeals to populace, 8 7 ; o n composition of fleet, 9 0 ; and U krainian nationalism, 93 ; called Left SR, 94; in Communist party, 94, 1 80 ; tries joining Whites, 9 5 ; a n d National Center, 1 1 0- 1 1 , 1 2 7-2 9 ; on nature of rising, 1 1 3 , 1 88-89, 1 98-9 9 ; requests assistance, 1 2 1 ; and Vilken's offer, 1 22-23 ; and SR aid, 1 25 ; and anarchism, 1 69 n ; and Kronstadt Communists, 1 87 ; Dybenko on, 1 94 ; in Finland, 208-209, 2 1 6- 1 7 ; repatriation, 2 1 7 ; dies in prison, 2 1 7

Petro grad Defense Committee, 87, 96, 1 42 , 1 49 , 208, 2 1 0 ; formation of, 3 9 ; and strike movement, 40-4 1 ; and Oranienbaum mutiny, 1 3 7; demands rebel surrender, 1 45-46 ; takes hostages, 146-47

Petro grad Fighting Organization, 1 28

Petrograd Naval Base, mutiny at, 63 -64, 70, 92, 1 1 2

Petrograd Soviet, and strike wave, 3 8-40; holds special sessions, 4 1 , 7 1 , 142-44 ; on anti-Semitism, 46; withd raws

roadblocks, 49 ; negotiates with rebels, 1 4 8 ; claims victory, 1 54 ; on food crisis, 202

Petropavlovsk, battleship, 78, 8 1 , 84, 86, 90-9 1 , 9 3 , 1 1 6, 1 62 , 1 94 ; i n 1 9 1 7 , 60-6 1 ; meeting aboard, 72 ; frozen in ice, 1 0 1 , 1 40; bombards Krasnaya Gorka, 1 04 ; armaments of, 1 50-5 1 ; a s rebel headquarters, 1 57 ; and radio broadcasts, 1 5 8 ; struck by shell, 204; surrender of, 209- 1 0 ; renamed, 2 1 3

Petropavlovsk resolution, 1 0 1 , 1 08, 1 1 0- 1 1 , 1 43 , 226; adopted, 72 ; text of , 7 3 -74 ; and Anchor Square meeting, 77-7 8 ; and March 2 conference, 8 2 ; distributed on mainland, 86-87, 1 37 , 1 40 ; denounced b y Bolsheviks, 95-96, 1 3 1 ; implemented, 1 57-5 8 ; and anarchists, 1 69-70

Piatakov, G. L., 1 95n, 2 3 1 Pilsudski, Marshal Joseph, 82,

1 49, 2 1 8 "Plekhanov Battalion," 2 1 6n Poland , Soviet armistice with,

7; peace negotiations with, 20, 40, 82-8 3 , 1 3 3 ; anti-Soviet activity in, 1 1 7n; in Civil War, 1 49 ; and treaty of Riga, 2 1 9

populism, 57, 64, 9 8 , 1 7 1 -74, 1 76, 1 7 8, 1 8 5, 1 89-9 1

Populist Socialists, 94

Potemkin mutiny, 55 Pravda (Truth ) , on White

conspiracy, 95 prodrazverstka, see food

requisitions

Provisional Governmen t , 2 8 ,

57, 60-62 , 72, 1 0 3 , 1 1 4, 1 1 6, 1 1 8 , 1 2 1 , 143 , 1 89

P rovisional Revolutionary

2 6 7

INDEX

Committee, 9 1 , 1 1 3 , 1 27, 1 3 1 , 1 65, 1 80-82, 1 84-86, 1 99 ; formation of, 85, 8 7 ; membership of, 92-93 ; denounced by Bolsheviks, 94; denies conspiracy, 9 8-99 ; and military specialists, 1 00-1 02, 1 3 9 ; and National Center, 1 1 0- 1 1 , 1 1 6, 1 22; and Chernov, 1 24-25 ; and Oranienbaum, 1 3 7-3 8 ; negotiates with Bolsheviks, 1 40, 1 4 8 ; warns of attack, 1 40-4 1 ; rep lies to Trotsky, 1 45 ; and first assault, 1 53 - 5 6 ; functions of, 1 57-5 8 ; Mensheviks in, 1 6 8 ; criticizes Lenin, 1 7 7 ; and Kronstadt Communists, 1 85-88; morale of, 20 1 ; flees to Finland, 20 1 , 209, 226; members captured, 2 1 4- 1 5

Pubalt, 70-7 1 , 1 85 Pugachev, E. I . , revolt of, 1 4,

1 3 5, 1 74, 1 89, 1 9 1 Pushkin, A . S . , o n peasant

revolts, 1 4, 1 89 Putna, V. K . , 203

Quarton, H. B . , on workers' demonstrations, 36n; on Petro grad food supply, 4 8 ; o n French aid to rebels, 1 1 9 ; on Finnish neutrality, 1 20; on rebel food supply, 1 2 1 ; on Vilken's mission, 1 22 ; on moating of fortress, 1 39n ; on Bolshevik attacks, 1 9 6 ; on Red losses, 2 1 1 , 2 1 4n

Rafail, M . A., 1 9 5 Raskolnikov, F. F . , warns of

revolt, 6 8 , 9 8 ; c riticizes Zinoviev, 70; suicide, 23 1

Razin, S. T., revolt of, 14, 1 74, 1 89

Red Army, 9, 1 3 , 26, 1 04, 1 42 ,

1 48 , 2 1 4, 2 1 9, 225, 2 3 6 ; and peasant disorders, 1 5 ; and "labor armies," 27 ; and Petrograd strikes, 3 8 , 46-47 ; in Kronstadt garrison, 54, 1 59 ; in Civil War, 62, 66 ; opposition within, 69 ; morale of, 1 3 2-3 3 , 1 49, 1 5 1 , 1 96-97, 203 ; i n fi rst assault, 1 53 ff ; losses of, 1 5 5, 205-207, 2 1 0- 1 1 ; i n last assault, 202ff

Red Cross, and conspiracy charges, 9 5 ; and National Center 1 1 5 ; and aid to rebels, 1 1 8-2 3 ; American, 9 5 , 1 07, 1 1 9-22, 2 1 5- 1 6 ; B ritish, 2 1 5- 1 6 ; International, 9 5 , 1 1 9 , 1 22 ; Russian, 9 5 , 1 07, 1 1 7 , 1 1 9-23 , 202

Red Kronstadt, Bolshevik jou rnal , 2 1 3

Revolution of 1 905, 54-57 Revolution of 1 9 1 7, 3 , 1 0, 2 9 ,

3 2-3 3 , 42, 45, 65, 8 8 , 9 1 , 1 27, 1 60, 1 7 1 n , 1 89 , 228 ; and Kronstad t, 57-6 3 . See

also Bolshevik Revolution "revolutionary t roikas," in

Petrograd , 39; in Kronstadt, 87, 1 58 , 1 8 1 , 2 1 3

Riazanov, D . B . , 223 roadblock detachments, 26,

67; c ri t icized by workers, 3 7 ; withdrawn, 49, 75, 223 , 225 ; c riticized by rebels, 7 3 , 7 8 , 1 1 2, 1 80, 242

Rodichev, F. I . , 1 02, 1 04 Romanenko, rebel leader, 92-94,

1 57, 1 6 8 Rozhkov, N. A. , 4 7 Russian National Center, see

National Center Russian National Committee,

1 04- 1 05 , 1 09n, 1 29 Russian Parliamentary

Conmittee, 1 1 7

268

INDEX

Russunion news agency, 98, 1 0 8- 1 09

Ryan, Colonel, Red C ross official, 1 20

Savinkov, B. V., 1 09n, 1 1 7n Schapiro, Leonard, 80 Secret Memorandum, 1 05ff,

1 1 4- 1 5 , 1 23 , 1 32 ; and P rovisional Revolution ary Committee, 1 1 0- 1 1 ; on Krasnaya Gorka, 1 50-5 1 ; on food supply, 2 0 1 , 2 3 5 - 3 6, 240; text of, 2 3 5-40

Sediakin, A. I . , 203 Serge, Victor, on arrest of

Mensheviks, 47-4 8 ; c riticizes Kuzmin and Kalinin, 79-80 ; on Bolshevik reaction to revolt, 1 3 2 ; on rebels, 1 3 4-3 5, 1 9 1 ; on mood in Petrograd, 1 4 1 -42 ; on fi rst assault, 1 53 ; on Kuzmin's imprisonment, 1 87 ; on suppression of revolt, 2 1 2 ; on Stalinism, 228-29

Sestroretsk, 1 4 1 , 1 5 1 -52, 204 Sevastopol, battleship, 84, 9 3 ,

1 22 , 1 52 , 1 55 ; unrest aboard, 68, 7 2 ; frozen in ice, 1 0 1 , 1 40 ; armaments of, 1 50-5 1 ; struck by shell, 20 1 , 204; surrender of, 209- 1 0 ; renamed, 2 1 3

Shingarev, A . I . , 6 1 Shirmanovsky, military specialist,

99, 1 45 Shliapnikov, A. G . , 30, 1 8 3 Skosyrev, V. N . , 1 29 Skuratov, Maliuta, 1 7 6 "social revolution," 1 53 , 1 5 6,

1 72-73 , 1 89 Socialist Revolutionaries, 1 4 ,

40, 96, 1 1 3 , 1 43 , 1 45, 1 62 , 1 67, 1 70-7 1 , 1 � 3 , 1 89, 1 90, 1 9 8 , 2 1 7, 22 1 , 2 2 5 ; land program of, 1 1 ; oppose food

requisitions, 1 8 ; and Petro grad strikes, 43-45 ; favor Constituent Assembly, 44-45 ; arrest of, 47, 226; attacked by Bolsheviks, 95 ; and aid to sailors, 1 2 3-25 ; and rebel p rogram, 1 68 . See also Left SR's, SR Maximalists

Solovianov, E. N., military specialist, 1 00, 209

Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik (Socialist Courier ) , 1 26

soviets, 1 60-62; "free soviets," 3 , 64, 1 1 2, 1 1 4, 1 3 1 , 1 59, 1 67, 1 70, 1 8 1 , 1 95, 226, 243 ; Eighth Congress of, 8, 1 7- 1 9 , 22, 3 3 -34, 44, 70, 1 64, 22 1 , 223 ; Menshevik view of, 3 3 , 43 -44 , 1 68 ; "all power to," 3 3 , 58-59 , 96, 1 27, 1 60, 1 62 , 1 70-7 1 ; rebel v iew of, 62, 75, 1 62-63 ; "without Communists," 1 8 1 . See also Kronstadt Soviet, Petrograd Soviet

SR Maximalists, 60, 94, 1 1 2, 1 ()2, 1 7 1 -72, 1 8 9

Stalin, J. V., 3 , 222, 228-3 1 state farms, 1 1 , 1 3 , 43, 1 64,

1 7 1 , 1 90, 225, 245 Steinberg, I . N. , 1 8 , 3 3 , 6 1 slrc/' rsy ' ( musketeers ) , 54-55,

1 89 strikes, see workers Struve, P. B., 1 03 - 1 04 S\ eaborg, 56, 59 syndicali�m, 28, 3 1 , 1 89 , 227

Taga'1tsev, V. N . , 1 2 8 Tenth Cong ress of Communist

Party, 29, 1 8 3 ; Lenin add resses, 96, 1 29-30, 1 3 3 , 1 54-55, 1 77, 1 90-9 1 , 222-2 7 ; Kamenev addresses, 1 3 3 , 1 93 ; Trotsky reports to, 1 94 ; volunteers from, 1 94-96, 1 9 8, 203, 207,

269

INDEX

2 1 1 ; and NEP, 22 1 -2 5 ; condemns Workers' Opposition, 2 2 7 ; resolution on party unity, 227, 229

Th i\!rs, Adolphe, 2 1 3 , 2 1 9 Third International, see

Communist International "third revolution," 1 66-67,

1 70, 1 7 3 , 1 76, 242-43 "toilers' republic," 1 6 1 -62,

1 65 , 1 7 1 , 244, 246 Totleben, General E. I . , 1 50 trade unions, debate on, 29-3 1 Trepov, General D. F . , 1 76 Trotsky, L. D . , 1 2 , 97, 1 43 ,

1 87 , 2 1 3 ; o n K ronstadt rising, 5, 1 34, 1 3 7 ; on transport crisis, 2 2 ; and "labor armies," 26-27, 223 ; and trade union controversy, 3 0 ; praises sailors, 60-6 1 , 8 8 ; and Red Army, 62, 66; rivalry with Zinoviev, 70-7 1 ; and deserters, 77-7 8 ; o n B altic Fleet, 8 8 - 8 9 , 2 2 5 ; outlaws Kozlovsky, 95 ; o n White conspiracy, 9 6 ; goes to Petrograd , 1 44; issues ultimatum, 1 44-45 ; Deutscher on, 1 45 ; denounced by rebels, 1 46, 1 56, 1 75-7 9 ; on Kronstadt Communists, 1 8 3 ; reports to party congress, 1 94 ; sanctions gas attack, 2 1 1 ; expelled from party, 229 ; minimizes role in Kronstadt, 229-3 1 ; denounced as traitor, 2 3 1 ; murdered, 23 1

Trubochny factory, leads strike movement, 37-4 1 , 45. 47

Truvor, icebreaker, 1 40 Tseidler. G . F . , and Russian

Red C ross, 1 07 ; and Secret Memorandum, 1 07- 1 08 ; on food supply, 1 08 ; and aid to rebels, 1 1 6-22, 1 32

Tukhachevsky, M. N., 2 3 0 ; and

Tambov rising, 1 5 , 2 14 ; signs ultimatum, 1 44n; early career, 1 49 ; and first assault, 1 49-5 5 ; and final assault, 1 93 , 202-203 ; purged, 2 3 1

Tukin, rebel leader, 9 2-94, 1 57

Union of Commerce and Ind ustry, 1 1 6- 1 7

Union for the Resurrection of Russia, 45

United States, and aid to rebels, 1 1 5 , 1 1 8 , 1 2 1

U ritsky, S . P . , 1 94, 205

Valk, V. A., rebel leader, 92-94, 1 2 5 , 1 57, 1 68 , 209, 2 1 4

Vanderlip, W. B .• 1 3 3 Vasiliev, P. D . , 77-8 3 , 8 5 ,

1 1 1 , 1 85, 2 1 3 Vershinin, rebel leader, 92-9 3 ,

1 55 , 1 80, 209, 2 1 4 Vilken, Baron P . V . , goes to

Kronstadt, 1 22 , 1 27 -2 8 , 202 Vinaver, M. M . , 1 04, 1 1 5 Viren, Admi ral R. N. , 5 9 , 1 45 Vladimirov, General G . L., 1 0 8 Valia Rossii ( Russian Freedom ) ,

97 Volin ( V. M . Eikhenbaum ) , on

Petrichenko, 1 69 n Volsky, V. K . , 1 8 Voroshilov, K. E. , 1 95n, 2 3 1 Vorovsky, V. V., 8

War Communism, 5ff, 1 30, 1 78, 228 ; Bolshevik attitude toward, 1 6- 1 7, 3 1 -3 2 , 34; abandonment of , 49, 1 98 , 222-2 3 ; criticized b y rebels, 74, 1 63

workers, conditions of, 2 3 -2 7 ; and food rations, 23-24, 3 6-37, 47-48, 7 5 ; t ies with village, 24-2 5 ; disillusionment with

270

\' :.,r. \

INDEX

Bolsheviks, 27, 3 5-36; and

workers' control, 2 8 ; strikes

of, 36-50, 7 1 , 8 3 , 2 1 8 ; anti

Semit ism of, 46; in Kronstadt ,

54 workers' cont rol, 28-3 1 , 65,

1 72 , 2 2 5 ; rebels on, 1 65 , 244 Worke rs' Opposition, 30, 1 82-8 3 ,

1 95, 227 World War I, 7, 1 0 , 1 3 , 37, 42.

5 3 , 90, 9 9 , 1 49-50 World War 11, 2 1 7 W rangel , Baron P . N . . 40. 89,

1 1 6, 1 3 .2 , 1 46, 2 1 9 ; defeat

of, 7, 1 3 , 3 1 ; in Turkey, 20, 1 0 5 ; under French protection,

1 05 ; and Secret Memorandum ,

1 05- 1 06, 2 3 8-40 ; and Na!ional

Center, 1 07 ; appeals fo r aid.

1 1 7 ; wires Kozlovsky, j 1 7 ; collaborates with rebels . 1 27-29

Yakove n ko, Y., rebel leader,

92-9 3 , 1 2 7 ; in B o!she \ ik

Revolution, 9 1 , 1 7 8 ; and

National Center , 1 29 ; denounces Trotsky and

Zinoviev, 1 7 7-78 Yarchuk. Kh. Z. ( Efi m ) , 57-5 8 ,

1 69 Young Communists, 1 4 1 , 1 9 3 ,

1 97, 225 Yudenich , Gene ral N. N . , 40,

1 03 - 1 05, 1 1 6n, 1 20 . 1 3 0, 1 3 2 -3 3 , 1 49 , 1 54, 1 9 1 . 2 1 8

Zatonsky . Y . P . , 1 9 5n, 23 1 Zenzinov. V. M . , 1 24 Zhelezniakov. A. G . , 6 1 -62, 1 69 Zinoviev. G. E . . 1 2 . 76, 87.

96, 1 3 2. 1 49 , 1 8 7, 2 1 3 , 2 3 0 ; a n d Petro grad strike, 3 8- 3 9 ,

4 6 , 1 4 2 : grants concessio;:s.

4 8 - 50, 75, 1 94 ; rivalry with

Trotsky. 70-7 1 ; and Oranien

baum mutiny, 1 3 7 ; denounces

rebels , 1 4 3 , 1 46 : and anarchist

appeal. 1 47-4 8 ; denounced by

rc;b ,:: ls , 1 7 5-79 ; purged , 2 3 1

2 71

Kronslacb PAUL AVRICH 1921 - Libcom

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